The Telegraph. Welcome to Planet Normal, The Telegraph podcast with Alison Pearson.

Hello. And me, Liam Halligan. We hope your new year has blasted off with a full tank

of post-festive fuel. We're continuing with our rearview of 2025,

while co-pilot Pearson is topping up her tan down under, and I'm back in Blighty,

topping up on my vitamin D intake to ward off the wintry post-Christmas snuffles.

But in the meantime on this, the second of our best of Planet Normal podcast, we bring

you some interviews featuring more of the stairways who've joined us on the flying refuge

of reasoned views before our return on Thursday the 22nd of January.

In October, Helen Waitley, Conservative MP for Favisham and Mid-Kentz and Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, joined us to discuss her political focus on health and welfare.

Waitley was shadow care minister during lockdown and then a Treasury Minister before resigning in 2022 in protest at Boris Johnson's leadership.

She returned to the social care role under Rishi Sunak and then under Kemi Bavnock's leadership, she was appointed to the shadow work

and pensions role. Part of Helen Waitley's brief is to identify welfare savings which isn't easy.

And with that in mind, I started by asking her how she felt to be

holding one of the toughest briefs in the shadow cabinet. Well, as you say, it's a tough brief,

but actually it's a brief that I wanted. When Kemi Bainaut became leader of the Conservative Party,

I just said to her, I would really like to be shadow sector estate for work and pensions because it's something that I really care about. And I think there is, well,

firstly a huge opportunity in fixing the problems that we have in welfare as a country and actually

an imperative to do that as well. And it's one about the numbers and the savings we need to be

made, but it's also a moral imperative to get people off benefits and then to work.

So to your question about, you know, what's the scale of the challenge we face?

I mean, firstly, in terms of people, there are around 10 million people who are of working age, but economically inactive.

Six and a half million people of working age are on out-of-work

...