The Labour Party has claimed the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said her party would cut state pensions.
“Kemi Badenoch has put pensioners on notice: the Tories would cut the state pension,” Labour said in social media posts.
Evaluation
This is untrue, although what Ms Badenoch was talking about is somewhat unclear.
At most she said that she would consider means testing the so-called triple lock, which decides how rapidly the state pension rises each year.
The facts
The claim is based on Ms Badenoch’s appearance on radio channel LBC on January 16. Although the questioner was asking about means testing the triple lock, at no point does Ms Badenoch directly say she will means test the triple lock.
Instead she said that her policy work would look more at means testing. The only policy she directly mentioned was the winter fuel payment.
A clip from the interview shows Ms Badenoch being asked about means testing the triple lock.
In response she says: “So that’s exactly the sort of thing that the policy work we’re going to be doing will look at. I’ve always said that we don’t do means testing…”
At this point Ms Badenoch was interrupted by the presenter, who asked: “So you’re actually going to look at the triple lock?”
Ms Badenoch replied: “No, we’re going to look at means testing. Means testing is something which we don’t do properly here. I’m someone who always said, for example, that millionaires should not be getting the winter fuel payment.
“But what Rachel Reeves has done is the extreme version of that where people who are actually on the breadline have had their winter fuel payment taken away. We don’t have a system that knows who should get what. That’s the sort of thing we need to be looking at. Now the triple lock is a policy which we supported throughout our 14 years in Government.”
The triple lock is a mechanism which decides the annual increase in the UK state pension. It means the pension will rise either at the same rate as inflation, earnings or 2.5% – whichever is higher. It has been in place since 2011.
This means that even if Ms Badenoch planned to completely scrap the triple lock – which she did not say – it would not mean a “cut” to the state pension as Labour claimed. It would simply mean that it remained at the same level. Over time that would erode the real-terms value of the state pension.
Links
Clip from interview on LBC (archived post and video)
House of Commons Library – State Pension triple lock (archived)
