Andy Burnham shouldn't be taking a single penny off pensioners while wasting billions of pounds a year, says Patrick Christys

"In April 2030, we will adjust it. The state pension will continue to rise every year, at least by prices, or 2.5 per cent, and it will hold its value relative to earnings over time, so that pensioners will always share in the rising prosperity of the nation."

So he made it very clear that whatever savings this Government makes from scrapping the triple lock would go towards social care for the elderly.

He said: "So this is the deal. A state pension that rises every year, no care charges and a high quality National Care service to give peace of mind. In later life conference I am going to go out and argue for that a good deal for our pensioners and for older people in the 21st century.

"And I will do it. I will do it in memory of my dad, an out of complete respect for everyone who cared for him."

But it looks like this isn't completely true. The Guardian is reporting that the new National Care Service will cover personal care costs, but not the residential element of staying in a care home, which tends to be the expensive bit, really, doesn't it?

That's the bit that means that people have to sell their homes, clear out their savings, etc., which is a pretty major clarification.

Patrick Christys hits out at Andy Burnham's plan to scrap the triple lock

GB NEWS

So let me just outline the current setup when it comes to the triple lock. At the moment, your state pension will rise either by 2.5 per cent, the rate of inflation or by average wage growth. So for this year, for example, average wage growth I believe is apparently around 3.9 per cent. So that's what the state pension would rise by.

What Andy Burnham wants to do is remove the wage growth element, which is funny in a way, because that's what people think Labour are about to do to the whole economy. But we think that because the state pension is already projected to equal roughly 30 per cent of average earnings by 2030, he's essentially introduced a safety net whereby the state pension shouldn't drop below 30 per cent of average earnings.

But in a normal economic year, where wages rise faster than inflation, the financial impact of switching from the triple lock to whatever this is is pretty tangible, leaving a full new state pension of roughly £100 to £130 out of pocket per year for each year it occurs. Now this adds up. So Labour thinks it could save about £15billion a year by the end of the 2030s.

Let me just tell you where I'm at with it. I don't think that you should be taking a single penny off pensioners while you're still wasting billions of pounds a year on other stuff. Take foreign aid, for example. We spent about £13billion on that in 2025. That's almost all of the savings that you're going to get from coming after pensioners.

The asylum bill is about £8billion a year. The Government has just announced new routes for Afghan women and girls and Palestinians. Well, they're probably going to be a net drain on the taxpayer. Figures show that only around 50 per cent of refugees are in employment and therefore paying tax after living in Britain for two or more years.

So why should pensioners have to pay to subsidise them? The Government scrapped the two-child benefit cap. It's predicted to cost the Treasury about £2.3billion this year, with the annual cost set to rise to £3billion by 2029 2030. And this will disproportionately benefit people of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nigerian and Somali heritage.

So again, why should British pensioners be paying for that? The UK Government spent a record £11.9billion on Universal Credit for households containing at least one foreign national last year. Well, then you've got to wind up what they're also spending those households on, educating their kids, the NHS, etc., which obviously we're paying for. Andy Burnham didn't address that in his speech today.

And then you've got other areas of huge waste that the British state just writes off like it's nothing. The Stonehenge Tunnel, a long debated road tunnel project under Stonehenge, was scrapped after drawing out years of legal and developmental costs. They just wrote off £472million of your money on a tunnel that didn't even go anywhere.

Then you've got all the smaller level stuff, which really does add up. For example, the Government hired top branding experts and paid them nearly half a million pounds of your money to essentially change the Government logo. What was the point of that? Half a million down the Kazi? Thank you very much. We'll just put a blue background on it and a little blue dot. Bingo.

I mean, my point here is this I think the social contract in this country has been completely broken. And I don't think from a moral perspective, you should be coming after pensioners until you've fixed it. By all means, make changes to the triple lock, but do it after you've stopped splashing our cash all over things that we don't consent to.

And just finally, Labour has lowered the voting age to 16. Scrapping the triple lock will go down very well with young voters, and I understand that. But I just want to issue a little bit of a warning. I don't think you're going to see any of that money, because the Government will just waste it.

And I think you're going to find yourselves in the next few years, coming out of university with a lot of debt and possibly struggling to get a job. Now, I think, where people used to start their career, say at the age of 21, I reckon that now more people aren't really going to get going until they're in their early 30s.

And that means that you won't have been saving or putting money aside in a pension. You'll be buying your first home later, if at all. You'll be starting a family later. All of those things cost money, and you might find that actually, you don't really start saving anything until you're nudging 50 years old, and by then, you might only really have 15 years of work left in the tank.

And I think that by the time the retirement age rolls around, you might look back on this moment and wish you hadn't celebrated scrapping the triple lock. Now, this is a situation where I'm very happy to be proved wrong. I hope the jobs market booms, you pay off your student loan, houses become more affordable. Everyone's a winner.

But I don't see it going that way. But it all comes back to this for me. What evidence is there to suggest that the Government spends your money well?

So, do you really believe that the money saved from scrapping the triple lock is going to be spent making people's lives better? Because I don't.