Badenoch vows to keep pension triple lock as conference opens
The Conservative leader told the BBC the guarantee is her party's policy in perpetuity, setting up a pension dividing line with Labour after the Prime Minister announced a move to a double lock from 2030.
Kemi Badenoch has vowed to keep the state pension triple lock, using the opening day of the Conservative conference in Birmingham to draw a dividing line with Labour over pensioners' incomes.
Speaking on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, she defended the guarantee that raises the state pension each year by inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest. "The triple lock is our policy. We believe this is the right policy for pensioners," she said.
Asked whether the Conservatives would keep the policy "no ifs, no buts" and "in perpetuity", she told the BBC: "That is what we have promised. There is nothing that has happened that has made me change my mind."
The triple lock is our policy. We believe this is the right policy for pensioners.Kemi Badenoch
She said that "going after the triple lock is simply moving money around", and that the Government should focus instead on getting working-age people who are claiming unemployment benefits into jobs. "The triple lock and pensions are things that people have contributed to," she said. "What we don't want to see is people going after the elderly, chasing after vulnerable and disabled people, and then the extremely large cohort of people who can work but are not working are left alone."
"What is going wrong in our economy is not lots of elderly people earning 10,000 or 12,000 pounds a year on the state pension, it is the huge number of people who can work who don't work," she added.
The pledge is a direct challenge to the Prime Minister, who used his keynote speech at Labour's conference in Liverpool last week to announce that the triple lock will effectively become a double lock from April 2030. From then, the state pension will rise each year by inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher, with the earnings link dropped. Mr Burnham said the change would generate "significant savings" to help fund an NHS-style National Care Service for social care, in a move the Government hopes will save about 15bn pounds a year by the end of the 2030s.
Mrs Badenoch said the Prime Minister had yet to show how modest savings in the early years of the next decade could fund a new social care system he has said he wants to get under way in 2030. She said his proposal to change the triple lock was already "falling apart under scrutiny", and that it would not generate enough savings to fund a national care system, meaning tax rises would be inevitable.
Bridget Phillipson, the Labour chair, said: "Before Kemi Badenoch's conference has even started she's failing to deal with Tory splits on the triple lock and secret plans for billions of pounds of cuts to public services. They reveal a Tory Party that is stuck in the past and remains completely out of touch with what people across Britain want to see."
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