Trevor Phillips put a minister in the hot seat today over Labour’s reluctance to lift the austerity-era two-child benefit cap.
The Sky News presenter began by noting there are a million UK pensioners who already earn £1,000 a week after housing costs, and that the government also gives £5.5bn to pensioners living abroad.
He said: “You’ve chosen to find an extra £13bn to keep the triple lock on these pensions alive – but you couldn’t find £3.5bn to alleviate child poverty.”
Phillips added that “half a million children would instantly be out of poverty” if Labour lifted the two-child benefit cap, according to now-Labour MP Torsten Bell.
“Why can’t you promise to do that?” Phillips asked.
The exchequer’s secretary, James Murray, said it was down to the “state of public finances”.
But Phillips hit back: “You’ve spent four weeks telling us about change. You can’t just say, ‘we’re going to change, we’re to change,’ and then say, ‘oh sorry we can’t do anything about it.’
“You’ve made this choice.”
Murray said the government has promised it would not make a commitment if it does not know where the money is coming from.
Phillips then showed the minister a clear graph tracing child poverty rates and pension poverty rates over the years.
He said: “There are twice as many children in this country – 4.2m – living in poverty as there are pensioners.”
Claiming the Labour Party has chosen to favour pensioners over children, Phillips said: “Is that the kind of change we can expect going forward?”
Murray said they had already tried to set up a comprehensive policy to help child poverty, but Phillips hit back: “But it does no involve giving any money to them. You’re giving the money to old people.”
The minister said all Labour MPs believe no child should grow up in poverty and that’s why the PM was working on a task force to develop a strategy to deal with this.
Phillips said: “You’ve set up a task force when you’ve had an opportunity to say, we are not going to stick with the triple lock, we are going to give money to help solve the child poverty problem.
“What you’ve done is given pensioners the money, and given the children the task force. Is that right?”
Murray said: “We were very clear in our manifesto that we would only make commitments that we could say how we would pay for and where the money would come from.
“If you start making unfunded spending commitments, that crashes the economy.”
He said that impacts the most vulnerable in particular – including children.
The presenter also cornered Murray over his party’s promises to raise public sector pay after independent pay review bodies recommended it was increased by 5.5%.
Phillips said the government would “never” be able to do that while staying within fiscal rules – unless they raised taxes.
“You’re never going to find £10bn, are you?” The presenter said.
Murray said there was a “proper process” to this.
Phillips said: “We don’t need the process to understand arithmetic.”
He then said although the chancellor was “sending a sort of jolly, happy signal, if you are going to stick to the fiscal rules – that’s your job – she’s not going to pay up”.
Murray said Reeves would lay out her plans at the end of the month, and that fiscal rules are “non-negotiable”.
He said: “This point around growing the economy is really important, because if we don’t get the economy growing, we’re going to be having the same conversation year after year.”