Burnham says there are ‘big decisions’ ahead on making council tax fairer – UK politics live

I have already posted lines from Andy Burnham’s BBC interview on reforming social care (see 9.03am), making council tax fairer (see 10.03am), and ruling out an early election (see 11.56am). And yesterday Peter Walker wrote up the lines in the interview from Burnham saying he would disagree with Donald Trump if necessary.

Here are some of the other comments worth flagging up.

• Burnham suggested care workers should be exempt from Shabana Mahmood’s plan to make foreign workers wait much longer until they can apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Currently workers normally have to wait five years until they qualify for settlement. Under Mahmood’s plans, the norm will become 10 years, and care workers could even have to wait 15 years (because working in a low-pay sector means they contribute less to the exchequer, the Home Office argues). Last week Kiran Stacey and Patrick Butler reported that Burnham may order a rethink.

In his BBC interview, Burnham came close to confirming this. He said that, while it was important to show the public immigration was under control, he wanted a “fair resolution”. Asked if he was looking again at Mahmood’s plans, he said:

I am going to look at what’s been said during the consultation. I mentioned social care before, and I see people contributing to our society by working in social care who’ve in many cases come from around the world to work there or work in the NHS.

I don’t think people actually say that that is something that we don’t want. We want people when they’re here and making a contribution to be able to be, if you like, supported and welcomed here.

• Burnham refused to say whether he personally trusted Donald Trump. When first asked this question, he said that he had just had one call with Trump, that it was a “good exchange”, and that “I always treat people as I find them”. Asked again, he said:

It’s a changing world, isn’t it, and you just have to obviously call things as they develop.

• Burnham said that he wanted to ensure that that defence investment plan was fully funded, but he suggested he does not yet have a plan to get defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030. “We need to work that through as we go towards the budget later this year,” he said.

• He said that he wanted Britain “to get really serious as a country at getting the welfare bill down”. As an example, he cited the way the housing benefit bill keeps rising as private sector rents rise, and how having more council homes could reduce housing benefit spending. He also implied he would like to see more conditionality in the benefits system. Asked if his plans would involve “removing benefits from anyone or reducing benefits for anyone”, he replied:

It’s about changing the nature of the support and making some of the support conditional upon people taking opportunities that are presented in front of them.

In fact, there is already a lot of conditionality in the welfare system; people getting out-of-work benefits are already required to show they are looking for work, or getting coaching on how to find a job.

• Burnham also said he was opposed to “crude cuts to benefits to get the welfare bill down”. He said:

The thing I’m just pushing back on is this idea that we go to a kind of crude approach, crude cuts to benefits to get the welfare bill down.

Often that just pushes people into even more crisis and then even more public spending in another part of the system. We need a system that sets people up for success rather than pays for failure.

• He said he would be “very prudent when it comes to the public finances” and that he would “stick to the fiscal rules”. He added:

I know people try and create a sense that I won’t take that cautious approach [to the public finances]. I will take that cautious approach.

• He suggested “vested interests” would have to pay more. When asked where the money was coming from to fund the “goodies” he was announcing, and where the “pain” was going to be felt, he talked about his record taking on bus companies in Greater Manchester, and his desire to shake up the water industry, which he described as “a system where the shareholders never lose and the public never win”. He went on:

So the pain comes, I’m afraid, in disrupting some of those arrangements and saying to those vested interests, you can’t have it like this anymore.

• He said his pet dog Axel will not be moved into Downing Street because he “wouldn’t get on with Larry” the No 10 cat. He said:

I think he’s going to have to stay up north I think, because he’s kind of got that angry little man thing going on. He’s got a bit of poodle in him.

He’s a bich-poo, I think they call it – or a poochon – whatever the phrase is. And, yeah, he wouldn’t get on with Larry, let me put it that way, and I don’t think the nation would thank me, would they, if I brought Axel down to disturb Larry’s world?

So I think he’s staying up here.

Originally published on www.theguardian.com — View original