ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SUNDAY WITH NIALL PATERSON, SKY NEWS

NIALL PATERSON: The Conservatives this week announced some changes to universal credit, including one identified by Sky’s Beth Rigby, reducing the waiting time from six to five weeks, but of course, Labour say the government hasn’t gone far enough. Joining me now from Oldham is Labour’s Shadow Pensions Secretary, Debbie Abrahams. Ms Abrahams, a very good morning to you.

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Good morning, Niall, you can call me Debbie by the way.

NP: Can we start with universal credit and the changes that were announced at the budget, an additional £1½ billion to assist in moving on to universal credit, reducing the wait from six to five weeks, easier access to loans, that to you isn’t far enough?

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Well first of all these measures come in in January next year, some of them in January, some of them actually in April, so it is going to mean 59,000 people over Christmas who will not have adequate support so we are very concerned about that. Then you mentioned the one and a half billion, that is actually £1 for every £10 that has been cut from the scheme, so we do welcome the government finally recognising that universal credit is not fit for purpose but as you say, it does not go far enough.

NP: To be absolutely clear, you don’t have a problem with the principle of universal credit?

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: No, we don’t. We’ve always said this, since it was introduced in 2010, the objectives around always making work pay, around making sure that we have a simplified social security system and fundamentally about reducing child poverty. When it was introduced in 2010 the government said they were going to reduce child poverty by 350,000, that then was reduced to 150,000 three years’ later. Now we know from organisations such as the Child Poverty Action Group, it is actually going to push, push a million more children into poverty by 2022.

NP: Elsewhere on your brief, the retirement age, something I have to admit I’ve become increasingly aware of over the past couple of years. Now you abhor the rise in the state pension age from 67 to 68 in 2037, why is that?

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Well we first of all recognise that life expectancy under this government, under austerity, is actually flatlining and for some groups it is actually falling, the only developed country in the world where this is happening, is actually getting worse. The government try to say that we’re going to increase the state pension age to recognise an increase in life expectancy which is not now there so it is completely inappropriate so we have said that we need to make sure that we have a review around the state pension age which our pensions commission is undertaking now, with a view of looking at a more flexible state pension retirement age, as happens in other parts of the world.

NP: That sounds awfully like something your colleague, Alex Cunningham, was talking about this week, the idea that the state pension age shouldn’t be fixed but instead should be linked to your life expectancy, your job, your health. Is that something that you could consider?

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Absolutely, Alex is part of my team, we work obviously very closely so he is just reflecting what we set out to be fair in our manifesto earlier this year. So we are very clear that it is unacceptable that we should be even considering increasing the state pension age before we had untaken this review. It is completely inappropriate for the government, first of all they broke their own Pensions Act by not actually reporting as they were meant to do during the middle of the general election, ultimately doing it to say that they were going to increase it when their evidence was saying, as I say, that life expectancy is getting worse.

NP: Still, at the same time you are a strong champion, if not in fact the strongest champion of the triple lock and that puzzles me to an extent. Why should pensions rise faster than wages? Those benefiting from it currently have had home ownership, free higher education, final salary pensions.

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Well we have always been very clear it shouldn’t be either/or in terms of supporting our children and young people, making sure that they don’t go into poverty, or our pensioners. We know for example that there are 300,000 more pensioners living in poverty now than there were in 2010. We are still a rich country, not in the top five anymore because of this inept government around their economic record, but we are still a wealthy country and it is inappropriate, totally inappropriate that we should be considering making our state pensioners worse off as it is inappropriate to push children into poverty as this government is doing.

NP: But these are the difficult decisions that a government in waiting has to make. I mean the figures involved in terms of pensions are incredible, if pensions had gone up in concert with pay we’d have saved £28 billion over the last six years, money which could have gone straight to the health service which, as you and I both know, is under huge pressure precisely because of that ageing population.

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: I’m sorry, Niall, I just don’t agree with you. First of all there was no additional cost because this is already … the government had to pull back because of their deal with the DUP who also said they wanted to retain the triple lock and also the winter fuel allowance so we shouldn’t be considering pushing our pensioners into poverty or our young people. You are absolutely right, there are additional, different choices and it is wholly inappropriate again in this budget, the minuscule amount of support that this government has given to the NHS, no additional support at all to social care which is in crisis as you know. So you are absolutely right, different choices and this government’s choices in the budget this week have shown that there is no change, this is austerity as it has been over the last seven years and it is going to make things worse for the population as a whole.

NP: You had a little bit of a barney this week with the Conservative, Theresa Villiers. You said it was ‘absolute rubbish’ that your spending plans would increase taxation on ordinary working families. Leaving aside the rather unparliamentary language, why do you think that’s the case?

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Well we made a commitment, a clear commitment again in our costed manifesto which Theresa wasn’t able to show hers because there wasn’t one, that we wouldn’t be taxing the majority of people. This was a manifesto and a costed plan for the many not the few so it is only the richest, the top 5% of earners and large corporations that would face additional taxation.

NP: Good use of props there Ms Abrahams, but perhaps you could turn to the page in the manifesto where it tells me exactly how much your programme of nationalisation is going to cost?

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Well we were very clear of what we wanted to set out there, we said that nationalisation would be paid and restored in industries such as the rail industry and so on, would be restored to public ownership because we know that the deregulation and the privatisation within these sectors just hasn’t worked.

NP: But you haven’t turned to the page where you tell me how much it costs, the reason is because you haven’t told us how much it is going to cost. It’s one of a number of figures which every week on this programme we ask the Labour party to provide what you’d pay in terms of a Brexit bill, how much nationalisation was going to cost but there are real questions around the Labour party’s economic competence, surely now is the point at which to start giving answers to these questions.

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: And I’m very happy to, if there is an election call. We will be ready and I will happily come and discuss those with you now but we have set out specific principles, for example around our National Transformation Fund, £250 billion over ten years so we would invest to grow the economy because we know from the Institute of Fiscal Studies and many other organisations, that productivity which drives wage growth, has flatlined, unprecedented in this country, unprecedented in the developed world. So we need to have an alternative approach and we believe with the National Transformation Fund, with the development in infrastructure around transport, around housing, around investment in our research and development that this will make a difference to …

NP: I’m very sorry to interrupt but you must see that as the Shadow Chancellor did this week, calling questions of this nature tripe as he did when he was pushed as to how much it would cost the UK under a Labour government to pay off the debt does nothing to enhance your already pretty poor reputation for economic confidence. Theresa May, Philip Hammond enjoy a 13 point lead on that over Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

DEBBIE ABRAHAMS: Are you seriously trying to say now that the fact that we have one of the lowest growths in the G7, lower than the EU average, that we have productivity as I say that’s unprecedented in terms of flatlining, that we are going to have another decade where wages haven’t grown, where people on the National Living Wage are not going to get their pay rise in 2020 so it means they are going to be even worse off, that the absolute horror that people are facing in terms of debt, in terms of arrears and evictions, is this government’s answer. They have had seven and a half years and this is all that they have come up to. We have a costed plan which is recognised by Nobel Laureates such as Josef Stieglitz and Paul Krugman that will work. The Institute for Fiscal Studies have recognised that just like ordinary businesses are investing in their businesses to grow, that this is the way forward. As far as debt is concerned we have one of the lowest national debt interest rates in the world and we know that we will get a 10% return …

NP: Debbie, I am so, so sorry, we have to say goodbye very quickly as we ae just about to run out of time. Debbie Abrahams, many thanks for being with us.