Leaked Budget Day papers: €1.5bn for purchasing power, welfare cuts largely scrapped
The Jetten cabinet reverses most of the planned social security cuts and delays the higher healthcare deductible by a year — paid for partly by a €750m tax increase on higher incomes.
After weeks of negotiations, a missed deadline and three postponed cabinet meetings, the coalition of D66, VVD and CDA reached agreement on the 2027 budget on 31 August. Details leaked the following day: €1.5 billion is set aside to repair household purchasing power, the planned cuts to unemployment and disability benefits are largely reversed, and the increase in the healthcare deductible is pushed back by a year.
The counterweight is a €750 million tax increase on higher incomes. Prime minister Rob Jetten said the package contains enough concessions for opposition parties to support it — necessary, because the minority cabinet has no majority of its own.
For this ledger the relevant point is not the political arithmetic but where the money goes. Purchasing-power repair is, in substance, compensation for the accumulated cost of energy, housing and inflation shocks. It is booked as social spending, but it exists because the crises tracked here pushed household costs above what wages absorbed.
The same holds for the delayed deductible: postponing it does not lower healthcare costs, it moves who pays them and when. Both measures show up in the Dutch figures on this site as public spending that would not have been needed on a pre-crisis cost structure.
Source: NOS, 1 September 2026