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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the Chancellor is under fresh pressure today to rethink planned cuts to tax credits. There are reports that a number of Conservative ministers are concerned with the Scottish Conservative Leader, Ruth Davidson the latest to voice her unease about the reforms and members of the House of Lords where the Conservatives don’t have a majority are threatening to vote against the policy tomorrow in a so called ‘fatal motion’.  Then on Thursday another debate in the House of Commons backed by two senior Conservative MPs and the Labour Chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, Frank Field, who joins me now.  A very good morning to you Mr Field, so a lot going on in Parliament this week concerning tax credits and we have been reporting for many weeks now the growing the concern across many shades of political opinion in parliament.  Do you think, and you have been saying, there is a way out of this for the Chancellor, there is a compromise?

FRANK FIELD: Well I think if the Lords vote tomorrow for a pause rather than a killer amendment, I don't think it is their place to actually kill anything off but I do think their role is actually to give people the space to think and then we’ve got the beginnings of our Select Committee inquiries which actually will start to tease out what the alternatives should be, knowing that the Chancellor wants to make large savings in public expenditure to get the debt down.

DM: Just on the Lords, do you think that if the Lords did go for the nuclear option, to kill it, then suddenly it changes the focus, this becomes about the constitution, about the role of the House of Lords within our not written down constitution and suddenly the fundamental issue gets caught up in the snowstorm?

FRANK FIELD: Yes, I think the … I hope the House of Lords tomorrow says the big issue for them is to concentrate on tax credits, not to bring a speedy recovery or reform process to the Lord themselves.  I think there is something to be said for the Lords interfering here in that this was the main part of the budget, the tax credit changes, they were the biggest changes in the budget, they are the biggest cuts in welfare ever and yet the Chancellor didn’t put this in his budget but put it into what is called the statutory instrument which wasn’t going to be debated on the floor of the House of Commons but in one of the committee rooms upstairs so in that sense right isn’t on one side here.  The Lords don’t have a right to interfere with the budget but the government decided not to put this in the budget, to put it into a form of legislation which the Lords can interfere with so I hope they draw back.  They have got three motions before them tomorrow, there is one that actually asks for a pause and I hope they are going rally behind that one which then gives the Commons, which ought to decide this issue, time to actually put proposals to the Chancellor.

DM: So that would be the shot across the bows but what are you proposing?  You accept, and I know we’ve talked about this before and you highlighted it almost as soon as you heard it within the budget in July, there is another way, there is a case for reform, the bill has ballooned?

FRANK FIELD: There is.  I mean there is no question that when tax credits began we weren’t going to pay MPs tax credits because that’s what was actually happening in the last parliament, that was never the scheme.  The problem is that the structure that we have now, it’s impossible to take the top ones, the high paid out or the higher paid out without also damaging those at the bottom so I would hope the Chancellor might look at a number of proposals. One is how might he anyway mitigate the effects on the very poorest; secondly, is there not a case for actually looking at bringing in the changes only for new claimants?  One of the issues that the Select Committee will be looking at, what is the turnover, how quick would people actually be transferred to that new scheme?  But thirdly, it is obvious that tax credits are here for the long run.  While the government talked about introducing this new super benefit, Universal Credit, it is hardly crawling out at the pace of the rollout and I would have thought for the next ten years many people would be depending on tax credits.  Wouldn’t now be rather a good time for him to look at a much simpler scheme where he can take people out at the top without actually damaging anyone at the bottom?

DM: But what happens if you just increase the mitigation – we know there’s an Autumn Statement coming up and there is talk about pushing up the threshold for starting to pay National Insurance contributions and perhaps pushing the tax paying threshold even further?

FRANK FIELD: That will actually not help those specifically who are damaged by these tax credit changes and would be a rerun of Gordon Brown’s 10p tax.

DM: Which you warned Gordon Brown about I remember.

FRANK FIELD: Yes, indeed and on the night before when he knew he was going to be defeated in the Commons huge sums of money were thrown everywhere to buy off MPs and their constituents whereas the 10ps who had lost everything by that move were not specifically compensated.  What I hope this time is that these ideas of pushing this threshold up and that threshold up, is no substitute for actually dealing with the injustices that will come to lower paid workers by these tax credit changes.  

DM: A couple of internal party matters and in particular the growing talk about deselecting Labour MPs, your view please?

FRANK FIELD: Well it’s within the Constitution that Labour MPs are up for reselection and they are judged accordingly but if in fact what we’re going to get a purge of those who don’t agree with a particular line, I think it’s very important for those in the party who believe in free speech and in an attempt to try and establish how do we face the electorate next time rather than running away from the electorate, that we collectively – and after all we are the party of the collective – we actually say that a huge number of us, if anyone is picked off they should call a by-election immediately and we all campaign for them.  They can’t expel huge tranches of Labour MPs so let the so-called radicals do what they wish but they should know we are not going to be like individual rabbits staring at highlights but there will be a collective response and I think once they realise that both sides have got whites to their eyes, I think that this whole issue will blow over.

DM: And a quick thought about the Labour party as a UK wide party, I’m talking to Kezia Dugdale, the Labour leader in Scotland in a few minutes time, there is talk in the papers today about more autonomy for Scottish Labour, what do you think about that?

FRANK FIELD: Well Scottish Labour in terms of parliamentary representation hardly exists so the electorate have actually solved what we should have done two parliaments ago and that is to have an English Labour party.  We are at the moment a clear minority in England, if we go dragging our feet where the Tories in fact capture the English vote, then goodness knows whether there is any future for Labour in the general election.  What we must do is stake out our claim to be the English party, representing English interests and therefore Labour in Scotland, in Wales and one would also like to see in Northern Ireland, they should do their bidding for their electorate but the tranche of votes are in England and it is extraordinary folly for Labour thinking that somehow appealing to a UK vote is actually going to persuade English voters so the sooner we actually say that there’s an English Labour party as there is a Scottish Labour party and so on, the better.

DM: Mr Field, thank you very much indeed, Frank Field there.