Nick Clegg: Rich pensioners should be stripped of benefits

 
Nick Clegg
Lewis Whyld/PA Wire
17 December 2012
WEST END FINAL

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Nick Clegg today suggested wealthy pensioners should be stripped of a raft of benefits as Britain continues to struggle to balance the books.

The Deputy Prime Minister insisted he was driven by the principle of fairness and that meant "money should not be paid to those who do not need it".

Such a move would lead to means-testing for the winter fuel allowance, free bus travel, prescriptions and television licences.

Prime Minister David Cameron is committed to keeping the universal benefits in place until 2015 but many Tories are keen for reform.

In a keynote speech, Mr Clegg mounted a vigorous defence of the coalition's welfare reforms, insisting the Government had an "absolute duty" to ensure the system was fair to all.

While acknowledging the changes had at times been "painful and controversial", he argued that the Liberal Democrats had ensured they were firmly anchored in the political centre ground.

Without reform, there was a risk of a "total collapse" in public support for the whole principle of welfare, he said.

His speech - on the eve of the fifth anniversary of his election as leader of the Liberal Democrats - comes at a difficult moment for the Lib Dems with a series of weekend opinion polls showing them slumping to fourth place behind the UK Independence Party, with their support down to just 8% or 9%.

Mr Clegg's former director of strategy, Richard Reeves, today suggested the "curtain will probably fall" on the coalition before 2015 if the party fails to boost its support.

"Next year is the year the Lib Dem strategy - deliver then differentiate - will be tested. A more assertive stance in act two of coalition should mean greater support and more votes. If not the curtain will probably fall on the coalition before 2015," he wrote in The Guardian.

Mr Clegg acknowledged today that governing in difficult times had meant the party had acquired a "harder edge", but said the alternative was "a retreat to the comfort and relative irrelevance of opposition".

With the welfare system they inherited from the former Labour government both badly designed and financially unaffordable, the coalition had no choice but to carry through major changes, he added.

In his address to the Centre Forum think tank, he said: "When two thirds of people think the benefits system is too generous and discourages work then it has to be changed, or we risk a total collapse in public support for welfare existing at all."

"We need welfare protection for people who fall on hard times. Of course. But you cannot ask low income working people to pay through their taxes for people who aren't in work to live more comfortably than they do."

While the Lib Dems had ensured that protections for the most vulnerable were built into the system, Mr Clegg emphasised that reform was not forced on them by Conservatives.

"It was in our manifesto and on our agenda right from the start. The Liberal Democrats are now the party of welfare reform - sensible, centre ground welfare reform," he said.

Mr Clegg argued that Work and Pension Secretary Iain Duncan Smith's new Universal Credit - intended to ensure people are always better off in work than on benefits - was fully in line with those principles.

"I want us to keep at the front of our minds the idea that a liberal state is an enabling state," he added.

People with medical conditions should be given the support they needed to get work, rather than being left to live on sickness benefits, he suggested.

"Some conditions are so common that we simply cannot write sufferers off and pay them to stay at home," he said.

"It is time for politicians and the benefits system to recognise that people with health conditions have just as much potential as everyone else if only they are given the help they need to get on."

However, in a swipe at Chancellor George Osborne, who said the Government should be there for the "strivers" and not "shirkers", Mr Clegg said not everyone who cannot find a job is simply being lazy.

When the Conservatives proposed benefit cuts of £10 billion in the Autumn Statement, the Lib Dems had acted as a moderating force, ensuring they were held to £3.8 billion.

"Of course, there are some on the right who believe that no-one could possibly be out of work unless they're a scrounger," he said.

"The siren voices of the Tory right who peddle this myth could have pulled a majority Conservative government in the direction of draconian welfare cuts."

At a regular Westminster briefing the Prime Minster's spokesman said: "The Prime Minister made a commitment to protect those benefits and he believes in keeping his promises."

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