Transcript: IDS on Today

Iain Duncan Smith appeared on the Today programme this morning. In a heated interview with Evan Davis, the work and pensions secretary was interrogated about David Cameron’s radical welfare proposals. Conversation ranged from cutting rental payments for under-25s to protecting non-means tested pensioner benefits. The bulk of the exchange was devoted to discussing Cameron’s intentions, as he seeks to make welfare reform a central part of the 2015 election. Here is a transcript of those passages:

Evan Davis: Okay, I’m going to quote a couple of things that you wrote in your green paper. ‘Successive governments have made well-intentioned but piecemeal reforms to the system. None have succeeded in tackling the fundamental structural problems that undermine personal responsibility in effectiveness of welfare,’ you wrote. ‘The scale of the government’s ambition in this area warrants the consideration of more fundamental structural reforms’. And then you went on to say you’d identified the key failings and outlined the objectives and focused on how to resolve them, so why is he [David Cameron] asking questions like: what is welfare for, for goodness sake, today?

Iain Duncan Smith: Well first of all, Evan, you are right, we are engaged in possibly the most radical and wide-ranging welfare reform in a generation, and we have achieved a lot in the last two years, and the Prime Minister’s speech will reference that hugely. The key thing here, of course, is that he is trying to build on that so we get to the end of this parliament after we have created all of this, and the question really he is asking himself, I think, is reasonable for a general discussion, is on the back of all of those changes and reforms, where we have brought in universal credit, where we’ve reformed Housing Benefit and seeing more people going back to work as a result of that, the Work Programme and changes to the Sickness Benefits and the DLA, where then on working age benefits should we really be asking three questions. One, therefore, what is it for, who should receive it, what the limits of state provision should be and should there be limits and what kind of contribution should we expect from those receiving benefits? So those are taking it to the next phase of what should change thereafter.

ED: But I thought you’d asked those questions, you say you are introducing a universal credit as though, tick, that’s done — we haven’t had it yet, we haven’t got it yet, you haven’t implemented it yet. That’s an enormous task, when’s it coming in? Is it coming in next year?

IDS: Absolutely. It starts next year as a lot of the benefit changes start …

ED: Is the IT all set up? Have you got it all worked out?

IDS: Yes, that’s all working on time and to budget but the key point is all of that is going through so none of this that he’s talking about here is referencing that. He says in his speech this is the biggest, most radical set of welfare reforms — so this government has gone further than most …

ED: But wouldn’t you, rather than thinking about the next most radical fundamental thing, and you asked the question what is welfare for, wouldn’t you do that before you engage in this one? Or is this just a speech in which he is attempting to politically position the Conservative party in an area in which they score well in the polls, attempting to position it separately from the Lib Dem coalition partners?

IDS: No, I don’t think so. I really genuinely, because I’ve discussed this with him at length. You know we reach a point where by the next parliament we do need to look at areas where for example he raises areas about the amount of money that people out of work with large families get. Do we actually say there is no limit to the amount of money you get for different children? Questions about why …

ED: I thought you’d dealt with that with the cap, the benefit cap. I’m sorry but before you’ve implemented one set of reforms, before you know how they work, whether they work, what effect they have, you are talking about a whole lot of new reforms that some people find very scary, you are talking about all of those without the information as to what the success rate of the last lot is. It’s just as a way of doing government seems absolutely bizarre.

IDS: Well this is exactly what the Prime Minister is trying to say. He is saying look, he wants to invite the nature of the debate and the discussion about really what do people genuinely think on the back of what we’ll have changed and on the back of what the success is …

ED: On the back of what you’ve changed but we haven’t seen it in action, we’ve only seen it on paper, you know …

IDS: That is why he is talking about this as reforms past the next election because by then we’ll have a much better and stronger feel about where the successes are and where are the things that we need to move on and I think it is a genuine and reasonable question and most people out there will want to ask it, which is this issue of fairness, so taxpayers working, thinking carefully about how many children they have and others who are not in work, do they do the same thing? And these are the questions that he’s raising and he is using most of these points in the speech as illustrations, they are illustrations of issues and problems, they are not stand alone and absolutes, they are things that we could implement but we need to look at them in more detail. The key question here is…

ED: Sorry, there is a very key question, George Osborne mentioned it would be helpful to find another ten billion in welfare savings in the next spending review, have you more or less accepted now that you have to find ten billion regardless of whether that works for the welfare system, have you got to find ten billion?

IDS: Well the whole of the government accepts that we have to find more savings because the nature of the recession etc is greater and the nature of the difficulties is greater; but nonetheless, of course, we will look to see what savings are available and what we can find and we will come to that discussion with him and we haven’t engaged in that yet.