AQ: Sarah Bool MP, Ellie Chowns MP, Jake Richards MP, Richard Tice MP

Any Questions? and Any Answers?

This episode of BBC's Any Questions features a heated political debate in Grantham, Lincolnshire, addressing four major policy challenges facing the UK. The panelists first dissect Labour's proposal to adjust the pension triple lock

Key takeaways

• Labour proposes smoothing the pension triple lock to prices or 2.5% (whichever is higher) to generate savings for a long-term National Care Service, though the Institute for Fiscal Studies questions if £15bn by 2040 will suffice.
• Reform UK's Richard Tice advocates approving Rosebank and Jackdaw North Sea oil fields to boost domestic refining capacity, arguing net zero policies have driven up diesel costs and reliance on imports.

Main topics

• Pension triple lock adjustment and National Care Service funding
• UK energy security, North Sea drilling, and diesel prices

Notable quotes

"This is a national scandal. Our care system at the moment is completely broken and it has been ignored by politicians of all different colours."

Conclusion

The episode underscores deep ideological fractures over how to fund public services, balance

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 7 (0:06) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Speaker 7 (0:17) Turning dreams into direction. Speaker 7 (0:23) Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. Speaker 7 (0:29) So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond borders. Speaker 6 (0:39) Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:08) Hello and welcome to Grantham, a market town in Lincolnshire. It began as a Saxon village. It grew with the wool and leather trade and later engineering and manufacturing. And it is famously the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher. We are at St. Wolfram's Church, which stands at the heart of the town and has been a place of Christian worship for well over a thousand years. Its stunning spire, which looms over Grantham, is one of the town's defining characteristics. While inside the church, there is a mixture of history, and vibrant contemporary life. Joining me here is Jake Richards, a Justice Minister and the Labour MP for Rother Valley. Jake was reappointed as a Minister by Andy Burnham in July and he's currently working on the government's men and boys strategy. Before politics, he practised as a barrister specialising in child protection. Sarah Boole is a Shadow Home Office Minister and Justice Minister and the Conservative MP for South Northamptonshire. Sarah became an MP in 2024. Before politics, she spent a decade as a qualified solicitor specialising in commercial property law. Richard Tice is the Deputy Leader of Reform UK and the MP for Boston and Skegness. He's also the party spokesperson for business, trade and energy. Richard used to be the Brexit Party MEP for the East of England. Before politics, his business career was in property investment and development. And Ellie Chowns is the Green MP for North Herefordshire and the leader of the party's parliamentary group in Westminster. She is also the party spokesperson on foreign affairs and the Treasury. Before becoming an MP, Ellie was a councillor and a Green MEP. She also worked for charities, including Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth. Grantham, please welcome your Any Questions panel. Speaker 1 (2:59) Now this week, like every week, our panellists do not know what the questions will be before they're read out live on air. Our first comes from Chris Toombs. Speaker 7 (3:08) Is swapping the pension triple lock for its double lock replacement enough to pay for Andy Burnham's National Care Service? Speaker 1 (3:17) Chris, thank you. So this was something the Prime Minister announced during the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week, that he wanted to adjust the triple lock mechanism, he says, which calculates how much the state pension goes up by, effectively breaking the annual link with earnings. for a new mechanism that would smooth that out over time. The argument from Andy Burnham is that it will pay for a national care service. Is he right? Jake Richards. Speaker 2 (3:43) Well, look, I think what the Prime Minister set out in his speech on Tuesday, Chris, was the beginning, and just the beginning, of building a new settlement for pensioners. And yes, that involves an adjustment to the triple lock, but it's really important to know what that means. By the end of this decade, the state pension will be the highest it's ever been. And every year in the 2030s, under the new mechanism proposed by Andy Burnham, the state pension will go up. It will increase in line with either prices or 2.5%, whichever is higher, and over a period of time will keep up with wages. But it will make some savings, the new mechanisms, and those savings can play a really important part in paying for a new national care service. And that is a critical challenge for our country, because when I speak to pensioners... and people entering that stage of their life, in my constituency and indeed across the country, one of their main concerns is how they're going to pay and provide for any care that they might need later in life. At the moment, the system is broken. Many of you in this audience will have stories of loved ones or friends or neighbours who have struggled to pay and get by when they needed the help when it was there, and it's providing and causing lots of pressures on the NHS more generally. So we have to tackle the National Care Service. And this adjustment to the triple lock will go a long way towards paying for it. Just Speaker 1 (5:04) in terms of a long way, because I think this gets to the heart of Chris's question. So the savings the government estimates are going to come from these changes to the triple lock are about £15 billion, but not until 2040. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has questioned whether that would be enough to pay for what the Prime Minister calls a national care service. And in fact, even the Prime Minister acknowledges... What this might find is free personal care, but not the bed and board if you have to go into a residential home. Speaker 2 (5:31) But look, this is a huge challenge. To build a national care service is not an easy undertaking. No one's pretending it's going to happen overnight. The Prime Minister is setting out a long-term ambition for this to be developed and implemented into the 2030s. Critically, Dame Louise Casey is undertaking her report, looking at what a national care service would mean, how much it would cost, how it could be phased in over time to make sure it's proportionate and it doesn't... Speaker 2 (5:56) damage the public finances or cause problems to our economy. That work is due to be published next summer. And clearly that will give the scope of the ambition. But let's be really clear, this is a national scandal. Our care system at the moment is completely broken and it has been ignored by politicians of all different colours, Labour Party, Conservative, different parties have passed the buck on this. And I was in Liverpool and I saw the Prime Minister's speech and I saw a political leader who was saying no. I'm not going to put my head in the sand anymore. We're going to find the answers to this. It might be hard. There may be a political cost to him and my party, but we're not going to turn our eyes to it. We're going to run towards the problem and fix it. But Speaker 8 (6:37) the reality is... Richard Dice. The reality is he's chosen to punish pensioners. That, folks, is the bottom line. This Prime Minister has chosen to punish pensioners and to make a very modest saving. And it's going to be topped up by some form of death tax or grief tax for everybody. We still know that. He misled the British people because he said in his speech that it would be on the manifesto at the time of the next general election. We now learn, subsequent to his speech, that actually Parliament is going to enact Speaker 3 (7:09) these changes before the general election. Perhaps Jake can clarify whether or not the Prime Minister did mislead the British people. And the amount it raised will be a fraction. of what he proposes by the National Care Speaker 8 (7:22) Service. You know, frankly, politics is about choices. And we at Reform, we believe that we should be protecting our pensioners. And that's why we have committed to the triple lock. We think you can find the appropriate savings by reducing vast amounts on foreign aid. This is a big problem. and, of course, scrapping next to zero. Speaker 2 (7:44) That answer, if I may, Richard, is symptomatic of a problem we've had in British politics, where a party, and yes, a prime minister, has set out a long-term ambition to build a national care service which will help generations after generations to come. We know there's a national scandal, and instead of engaging with it in a sensible manner, simply trying to score political points. We know... Speaker 2 (8:08) Politicians from all different parties know that the triple lock as it stands today is not sustainable going into the 2030s. Reform politicians have said it before. Conservative politicians have said it before. And now the Prime Minister is brave enough to Speaker 1 (8:22) say it in public. Speaker 2 (8:22) It's about how you save money Speaker 3 (8:23) and where you spend it. And this Prime Minister and your party has chosen to punish pensioners. Nonsense. That's the reality. Speaker 1 (8:31) Richard Tice, what are Reform UK's plans for social care? Speaker 3 (8:34) Well, we think that the social care system, Jake is right, it needs reform. But there is a better way of doing it. The care homes that I visit in my constituency, for example, there are whole wings which are empty. The operators of those care homes, they tell me about the bureaucratic blockages, the regulatory processes that add to costs and that hinder... care. Those are the things that I think we should be getting. Speaker 1 (9:00) Deregulate care homes is the answer. Speaker 3 (9:02) It's about reforming the way they're run, bringing them closer to the NHS. That is a key part of it. For example, you've got this constant debate between local councils and the care packages that they can fund and the NHS. Actually, that means you're pitting different parts of the state against each other. You can do it much better by reforming the way the system works. Speaker 5 (9:25) Ellie Towns. And that means that you have to look at how you're going to fund it. We do need to treat social care like we treat healthcare. It should be free at the point of need. It's crazy. Speaker 5 (9:41) We all pay into a system through taxation so that if we're unlucky enough to get cancer or something like that, the NHS looks after us. But if we're unlucky enough to get dementia or to need long-term care, there isn't a system for doing that. We need to use social insurance through the taxation system to ensure... And that will ensure that nobody has to face catastrophic costs, you know, spend all of their life savings on looking after themselves, whereas others... are lucky enough not to have to do that. We need to spread the cost and share it. And so I actually welcome what Andy Burnham has said this week. It is going to be expensive. It's going to be of the order of tens of billions of pounds. And he's made, frankly, quite a brave proposal. This is something I've previously talked about. I personally favour something called the smoothed earnings link, which connects the pensions to both inflation... and wages. It ensures that pensioners do not get poorer. That is crucial because we have to keep on driving down pensioner poverty. But of course, child poverty is twice the level of pensioner poverty now. So we need to fund social care. We need to make sure that our system of providing support to those who are struggling is fair across the generations and across the whole country. This is a good start of a conversation. Speaker 1 (11:03) So it sounds like... You're not totally opposed to the idea of looking at the triple lock, but when you talk about some sort of social insurance, are you talking about a hypothecated extra tax to pay for social care? Is that what the Green Party's advocating? No, Speaker 5 (11:16) the Green Party has always said we should treat social care like we treat the NHS. The funding has to come from somewhere. You're talking about, as you say, tens of billions. We pay for it through general taxation. The proposal that Andy Burnham has made... I mean, social care costs money. The question is, does it cost... 10 % of the population, everything they've got and everybody else nothing? Or does it cost all of us a little bit extra throughout our lives to have that security that we will be looked after when we need it? That's the principle the NHS is based on. It's how we should do social care. Speaker 4 (11:51) Sarah Ball. So we agree. I think, as Jake has said, look, social care does need to be addressed. And it has been something that all governments have been tackling and wanting to tackle for many times. And it's been caught up in different areas. What I'm just disappointed with is I think fundamentally it is cost. We have to be very honest about what this is going to cost, how much taxation that will be. I'm sad that... Andy didn't actually wait for Baroness Casey's review to be finished so that he could actually put forward a proposal that we could genuinely work on. I think as a party, the Conservatives said we are happy to work with the government in this thing, but we do not want to see extortionate tax rises. We don't want to be punishing or putting it on the back of pensioners. We've got to be able to get a very balanced system. Speaker 1 (12:32) But then, same question though, where does the money come from then? Because if you don't want to see tax rises, you don't want to see the triple lock change, which I think is now Conservative Party policy, where does the money come from? Speaker 4 (12:41) But this, well, part of it is, one, that's what I wanted to see from the Baroness Casey review, because I wanted to see where they analyse, where do they think that they can find the funding. The other thing is a wider point, just being pragmatic. We need to have a growing economy. There are so many issues at this moment. The question about the triple lock often comes up is when the economy is booming, when the economy is growing, this isn't as big an issue as it is when times are tough. And at this point, this is why it's coming into focus. What I don't want to see is the sort of intergenerational battle that has put being put forward that it's the young versus the old. We've got to be incredibly pragmatic. We absolutely have to provide decent and quality social care, but we have to be very responsible. There is only two forms of money the government has. It's taxation or borrowing, and we have an absolute duty to make sure we spend it properly and Speaker 1 (13:29) correctly. Speaker 4 (13:29) I'm still not entirely Speaker 1 (13:30) clear where you think the money would come from. Speaker 4 (13:32) Again, this is the thing, but nobody does in the country, and we're all surmising at this point. They might be looking to Speaker 1 (13:38) politicians and political leaders to tell them. Speaker 4 (13:41) But I also want the facts and the evidence about what the system even looks like, because we have to know what is the structure, how will it work in practice, if it is just then personal care, what does that mean if you're looking at a more whole scale and a wider system? This is the key. Absolutely. Our job here isn't just about the principles. It's very easy to talk about principles. Our job is to actually make sure the policy works in practice. And that is why I want to know what's happening with Baroness Casey's review. Speaker 5 (14:05) But just to be clear, pensioners are already paying for social care.