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.
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