19 February 2007
Tony Blair had a chance to look at some of the findings so far of his government’s policy review process during a seminar at Number 10.
Read the statement
"I think the presentations are very interesting and I think the next stage, to be absolutely blunt, is to get to a slightly harder edge on the outcomes. And the reason why I think this is very important is all of these issues are issues that have completely changed over the ten years."
"And then you are going to come finally, and I am not suggesting in relation to education and health, but to some quite difficult questions about how you fund it for the future.
Because we have come to a settlement in pensions in the end which says okay we are going to give you a basic state pension, we will re-link it with earnings but it is up to you to top that up and we will enable you to do that from this low cost savings vehicle, and what’s more we will opt you in unless you decide to opt out. But if you take going forward 20 years, unless we increase the numbers of people who are of working age in work we are going to find it hard to fund that over time. And let’s be absolutely clear, and this is why these debates about things like transport funding at the moment are so interesting, okay people may say we want more public money to go into building a better transport system but they are not going to pay any more tax to do that, we know that, they are just not going to do it.
"So I think what we need to do from this now, because I think there have been excellent presentations and they do analyse what is basically a changing society, is some quite clear policy directions out of it, not detailed policy but policy directions, where are you going on these issues to do with rights and responsibilities, delivery of services, the role of the state and so on.
"But you know the purpose of this all the way through is to get out of it a series of directions, the analysis is very clear, then to work out where the directions are. And actually let’s be absolutely clear - out there will be lots of people who would think they are paying enough tax at the moment so they are going to be asking well what does all that mean? And that is why you need to get to this sense I think of a fair bargain with the rights and responsibilities at the heart of it so that they think, for example, if there is more help for people down at the bottom end there is also more responsibility on people to take advantage of that help, otherwise you end up in a situation where they kind of think that this is a very worthy progressive agenda but you know someone is going to come and put their hand in their pocket in order to pay for it all."
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