Sir Iain Duncan Smith has asked why the Prime Minister is looking to target pensioners instead of cutting other parts of the welfare budget.
Speaking on GB News, he said: “The truth is, right now, I was looking at what [Burnham] said. He didn’t give a lot of detail, but it does look to me from the figures, that that would lead to about £5,000 less per year for pensioners.
“If it was today, it would be £9 billion less than the £16 billion that we spend, so quite a significant cut in the amount.
“Pensioner income is still lower than most of the averages; certainly, well lower than the average for Europe, and certainly lower than sort of comparable economies like France, Germany, or Italy and the UK.
“So, £12,500 a year isn’t a seam of rich pickings: it’s £12,500 a year, just about on the edge of paying tax. And the next increase will probably take them into paying tax for the first time, unless of course the threshold is raised.
“Everyone wants to talk about the state pension. The truth is that the whole of the welfare system, because of COVID, when I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, we saved around £24, £25 billion a year out of the welfare bill.
“It all went wrong in COVID. Everybody spent far too much money, took the checks off, etc. and that’s the bit that we’re now having to reel in and one can do it.
“The question really is: to what degree does a group of people who don’t earn any money anymore but rely on that, exactly why is that the big focus when the real focus should be on making sure people go back to work and making sure that what we have is a welfare system which is far cheaper.
“I think you can shave money off the triple lock to a degree, but I think if you’re not careful, you go too far, and then you have pensioners needing to go on to welfare because they can’t get enough money to live.
“One of the big problems is we used to have a great pension system in this country, but under Blair and Brown, that got overregulated and heavily taxed, and the result has been now that our pensions, which were once the envy of the whole of Europe, is now like a sick man.
“Anyone working trying to save for a pension now under the existing system really has a struggle to do it. Whereas in the old days they would have saved and had guaranteed incomes, they won’t get that on retirement. They will probably rely on the state pension.
“It’s not quite so simple as everybody wants to say that it’s all the fault of the triple lock. But he won’t be saving money for a long, long way ahead, because that’s not going to help him with his defence budget problems. It’s not going to help him with his tax problems or his borrowing problems.
“Because even if he introduced it tomorrow, it will take years before it has significant effect. And so he still has to answer the single biggest question: What are you going to do to reduce the welfare budget? And on that, not a single word was said.”