I’m starting to admire some of Kemi Badenoch’s qualities. The easiest job in politics is to simply go along with what may be popular but which could have disastrous consequences for the country.
Think back to all those Tory MPs who were boosters for Brexit without considering the catastrophic consequences. Badenoch has shown rare courage in calling into doubt two of the previously untouchable areas of public policy – the winter fuel payment and the triple lock on pensions.
Just as Labour’s Wes Streeting has set the socialist feathers flying by stating the obvious that the NHS is “a service and not a shrine” so Badenoch, before her election as Conservative leader, told us how many of her constituents were uncomfortable to be receiving the two or three hundred pound winter fuel payment when they simply didn’t need it and, after her election and only this week, she has called into doubt the commitment to the so-called “triple lock” on state pensions.
As Sir Humphrey would say: “Courageous, Minister.”
Back in the 2010 to 2015 government, the lock was introduced and guaranteed that pensioners would receive an annual increase of either the level of inflation, average wage rises or a minimum of 2.5 per cent. This sounded great and who of us in our mature years would not seize the offer with both hands?
Kemi Badenoch is right to stand up to winter fuel payment and the triple lock on pensions, writes Stephen Pound
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Some people who did not believe in the magic money tree asked where the funds would come from and the Treasury estimated the cost at £50million per annum.
I don’t want to upset too many people but occasionally civil servants get it wrong and, in this case, outrageously so.
We’re currently looking at over £10billion a year, and this is increasing. Pensioners constantly make the point that the rest of Europe – with some notable exceptions – pays a higher pension than does the UK.
This conveniently ignores the fact that individual taxes are far higher than in this country, and just as everyone wants open heart surgery in a cottage hospital, the prospect of high pensions and low taxation is intoxicating.
Unfortunately, it is simply not sustainable. Remember the howls that echoed throughout the land when the winter fuel allowance was removed from the wealthy and those who did not receive other benefits?
This suggests that the sound and the fury would exceed even that thunderous protest if the triple lock was abandoned.
To means test the triple-locked pension would be enormously expensive and massively bureaucratic even if it would have the end effect of protecting the less well-off while trimming the amount bestowed on the wealthy.
I dare to suggest that there is actually a fairly simple solution.
The answer is just to treat all income as taxable.
This would protect those on low incomes while avoiding adding to the wealth of those in the upper-income brackets.It might also be a way of correcting one of the cruellest imbalances in our fiscal structure – the lack of increased personal allowances for those in employment while benefitting those of us no longer working.
If we simply allow the present system to run on then an ever-increasing elderly population will accumulate more of national resources while those in employment, and often unable to afford to buy the house that was a real possibility for those of the immediate post-war generation, will become progressively poorer.
It seems contrary to even suggest that pensioners could be far better off than the majority of the working population, but that is the reality if we continue with the triple lock and fail to increase allowances for those of working age.
I think that Badenoch is onto something here, and I just hope that Labour and the liberals resist the opportunity to indulge in shroud-waving and talk of an armageddon of the aged.
We simply cannot afford to go on like this.