Pat McFadden

I listened to the shadow Secretary of State carefully outline her opposition to our plans. The trouble for her is that so many in her party agree with the case for change. The shadow Chancellor, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), for example, has said that we should “unpick” the triple lock. The shadow Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), has called it “simply not affordable” and described it as a “Ponzi system”. The shadow Justice Secretary, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), actually wrote the 2017 manifesto that pledged to replace it with a double lock. But my favourite is Lord Gove, who told LBC that if Andy Burnham changed the triple lock he would “declare that I will be campaigning at the next general election exclusively for Stella Creasy in Walthamstow.” I look forward to seeing him at the end of the Victoria line at the next election with a red rosette on his chest! I could go on, but we would be here all day. Let me just say that I have a file as thick as my morning porridge full of quotes from Tories saying that the triple lock is unsustainable and will have to be changed. They say it in private, they say it before they join the Front Bench and they say it after they leave it, but the shadow Secretary of State did not say it. That leaves her with some questions. How will she fund her opposition to what we have announced? Will it be, as when the Tories were in government before, through faster and faster rises in the state pension age, asking people to work into their 70s before they even get a pension at all? If she will not tell us that, can she tell us how they would fund the future of social care? Should we simply add that to the list of unfunded tax promises that they come out with on an almost-weekly basis? Stamp duty, inheritance tax, national insurance, private schools—all funded from fantasy welfare savings that they never manage to achieve in office. The right hon. Lady spent her time attacking the system that her Government designed, created and legislated for. She spoke about welfare bills rising. In this Parliament, they are rising at half the rate as in her party’s last Parliament in power. She spoke about pensioner poverty. It rose under the Government in which she served. We look forward to the report of the Pensions Commission next year. I referred to it in my statement. Baroness Casey will also report on how and when the national care system will be rolled out. In the midst of her attacks against a system that her own party created, the right hon. Lady did ask about welfare reform. We have already cut the gap between the health and standard elements of universal credit, and we have made changes to the Motability scheme. We have stopped people buying British pensions on the cheap, and we will make more changes following the reports of the Milburn and Timms reviews. The truth is that what we have here is a stark contrast between a party that is prepared to take the decisions needed to offer a new settlement for older people and their families, and one that is in the frankly pathetic position of resisting that change in public while, one after another, agreeing with it in private.