The Conservatives will fight the next election on a commitment to keep the triple lock, the party’s policy supremo has told The i Paper.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has faced calls to scrap the triple lock in order to win back younger voters and slash the welfare bill.
Despite those calls, the Tories will not touch the policy at the next election, Neil O’Brien, Tory MP MP for Harborough, Oadby, and Wigston said.
“We’re not going to touch it. We’ve been super clear about this,” O’Brien said in an interview. “That’s going to be our policy at the next election.”
The triple lock on the state pension was introduced by David Cameron in 2011 and guarantees it rises every year by whichever is the highest; 2.5 per cent, the increase in average earnings or inflation.
It has become emblematic of what many economists believe has been successive administrations’ inability to rein in spending.
From April next year, the triple lock is due to rise by 4.8 per cent due to the annual growth rate of UK wages.
Despite pressure to scrap the policy to attract younger voters has said the Tories will keep the triple lock as party of their manifesto (Photo: Parliament TV/PA)Nigel Farage has refused to commit Reform to keeping the triple lock and former Tory welfare secretary Damien Green recently added his voice to those demanding it be scrapped.
But O’Brien, who has been put in charge of formulating the Tories’ manifesto, says even if governments wanted to raise cash from wealthier pensioners there are better ways to do it than reducing the value of the state pension.
‘Going after the state pension is not good policy’
“If you want to go out there and make the case that you think that some pensioners are too rich you go out there and you do that, and you explain why you want to raise their taxes or something. But even if you want to do – I just don’t agree that going after the state pension is good policy.”
The 46-year-old Tory MP has been a fixture in Tory policy circles for nearly two decades. He worked for George Osborne at the Treasury and Theresa May at No 10 before being made shadow minister for policy renewal and development by Kemi Badenoch in July.
The current Tory leader shored up her position with a good party conference where she unveiled more policy than had been expected – and he reveals there is more to come soon. “We will keep going, I hope at a good pace, over the coming months. People are keen to have some sense that there is an alternative to what’s going on, because it does feel very, very doomy,” he said.
As they seek to claw back support from Reform and overhaul Labour what questions will the Tories be seeking to answer at the next election?
O’Brien starts his answer by acknowledging the scale of their defeat – and the challenge ahead. “We got an absolute shoeing.” Voters are more cynical than ever about politicians and the pledges they make, he suggests, so expect clear, detailed, specific proposals and “a spirit of humility”.
“The answer is a very, very clear sense of specifically how things will be different, what our specific plan is, and also that we have learned the lessons of things that did not go well under the last Conservative government.”
He means – but does not spell out – record levels of inward migration which has ceded the issue of immigration from the Tories to Reform. Without that weapon, the party aims to convince voters they alone can be trusted to repair the public finances and restore growth through spending cuts and not tax cuts.
‘Welfare bill is exploding’
The party has already promised to take £47bn off public spending – almost half of it coming from “excessive welfare spending”. With Rachel Reeves widely expected to find cash to lift the two-child benefit cap, at the Budget, O’Brien identifies “welfarism” as a key dividing line with both Labour and Reform, which has said it too would lift the cap.
“The welfare bill is absolutely exploding. I mean, the working age, non-pensionary welfare bill. You’ve got a £30bn increase between 2024, and the next parliament in spending. I think there is a problem there.”
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned in the summer that the annual cost of sticking to the triple lock on state pensions would reach £15.5bn by the end of this parliament – but the Tory policy chief makes clear that is sacrosanct. Instead, the party will find savings from cutting disability payments from those in mental ill-health, cutting the number of civil servants and further reductions in aid, among other reductions in spending.
square TRIPLE LOCK Ditch state pension triple lock and tie it to earnings, IFS tells Reeves
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O’Brien admits to enjoying watching Labour ministers struggle in government and says he has been shocked at how quickly their troubles have come. “The level of schadenfreude you feel as you watch these people just utterly at sea. You’ve got this government, it’s gone from incredible landslide to no sense of direction. They’re just the worst times in politics are when the engine is stopped and you’re just floating around on a sea just being buffeted by events, you’re staggering from scandal to scandal.”
“I mean, let’s be clear, we experienced some of this at the end of the last government. These guys have managed to get there within one year. Sometimes I feel I should offer therapy.”
Mischievously he cites Sir Keir Starmer’s new No 10 enforcer Darren Jones when asked who he rates in the Government – perhaps hoping Tory approval will do nothing to improve Jones’ popularity with his Labour colleagues.
But it is the answer he doesn’t give – at least not out loud – that is perhaps the most interesting. The prospect of some kind of electoral arrangement between the Conservatives and Reform fuels endless Westminster speculation. Asked whether he will rule out any deal the canny O’Brien shakes his head, before bounding down the stairs to his next appointment.
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