Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain on Tuesday faced his biggest parliamentary rebellion since he came to power a year ago when a significant number of his own lawmakers voted against landmark changes to the social welfare system.
Although Mr. Starmer won a vote in Parliament by 335 to 260 to advance the bill, he emerged with a weakened leadership after a public display of deep division within his governing Labour Party and a week of internal feuding over the plans.
The proposals were designed to cut the country’s spiraling welfare costs by raising the eligibility requirements for payments to disabled people. That was expected to affect hundreds of thousands of Britons, and last week the government conceded to pressure from its own lawmakers — more than 120 of whom threatened to torpedo the legislation — by promising the changes would apply only to new claimants.
That concession alone meant the welfare changes will save only about 2 billion pounds ($2.7 billion) a year rather than the £4.8 billion they were expected to yield by 2030, presenting a challenge for Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer.
The fact that only 335 lawmakers supported the bill, when there are more than 400 Labour members of Parliament, will be a jolt to Mr. Starmer. But having achieved a victory of sorts after offering several concessions, he will hope to push the legislation through its remaining stages in the House of Commons next week.
The furor over the planned cuts in Britain contrasts with those in the United States, where there has been little momentum behind any party opposition to a Republican marquee bill that would slash hundreds of billions of dollars in food benefits and remove, by some estimates, nearly 11 million people from the health care rolls.
But on Tuesday Mr. Starmer’s retreat failed to satisfy many lawmakers within his increasingly fractious party.
The rebellion in Britain came almost exactly one year after Labour won a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, a result that secured the party a majority of more than 170 lawmakers.
Since then, and despite some success on the international stage, Mr. Starmer’s personal popularity has slumped, and, in opinion polls, Labour now trails the populist right-wing Reform U.K. party, which is led by Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit campaigner and ally of President Trump’s.
Mr. Starmer has been forced into several policy reversals, including a retreat over a plan to restrict payments that help retirees with winter fuel costs.
The uproar over welfare cuts has been the most significant. The cost to taxpayers of the current social welfare system has been steadily growing, and the government says that since the coronavirus pandemic, the number of people receiving payments, known as “personal independence payments,” or PIP, has more than doubled — to 34,000 a month from 13,000.
That surge was largely driven by an increase in those who report anxiety and depression as their main condition, and the government has predicted that, without change, spending on working-age disability and incapacity benefits could increase to about £70 billion a year by 2029.
The threat to disability payments brought to the surface simmering tensions within a center-left party, many of whose lawmakers hate the idea of removing support from vulnerable people.
Under the revised plan, changes to the eligibility for some welfare benefits — including PIP, which assists people who have both long-term physical and mental health conditions — will now apply only to future applicants, not to existing claimants, as had been proposed.
Late on Tuesday, the government made a further concession, agreeing to delay changes to the eligibility criteria for PIP until after a government minister, Stephen Timms, leads a review of the system in consultation with groups representing disabled Britons.
But some Labour lawmakers still argued that there would be a two-tier system, with one set of rules for existing claimants and another for those who apply after the new rules go into effect.
Others pointed to modeling published by one government department indicating that around 150,000 people might be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of the welfare cuts. That is lower than the previous estimate of 250,000, but still a substantial number.
“These Dickensian cuts belong to a different era and a different party,” one of the leading Labour rebels, Rachael Maskell, said in Parliament before the vote.
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
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