Underperforming UK economy 'needs a radical overhaul', Mel Stride claims

Good morning, Mr Stride. Thank you for your company

Lots to talk about this morning, not least the winter fuel payment U-turn

What's the Tories' take on this? Well, you know, it's yet to be seen exactly what this looks like, who's going to get it

It was a huge mistake of this government to have, as one of its first actions

means tested that winter fuel payment. It meant that pensioners last winter, of those living below the poverty line, about 80% of them did not receive that payment

We were told at the time by Lucy Powell, the leader of the House of Commons, the Labour politician

that this was in order to, amongst other things, help avoid a run on the pound

It was completely crazy when they did it at the time. It was the wrong thing to do

But we'll wait to see exactly what the detail is now and whether this can be brought in to help people in time this winter

But a lot of this U-turn, of course, is because of the pressure that we as a party have been putting on this government in the House of Commons

Speech later on this morning aren you Mr Stride talking about economic stability and a radical rewiring of the UK economic model What do you mean by that So what I mean is for too long probably the last couple of decades since the global financial crisis in 2008 at least the economy has not performed in a way that has been appropriate

for the needs of both the people of our country and the challenges that we face. Productivity

and growth have been too slow. And if we're to tackle that, we need to have a deep, long

think about everything from our tax system, the level of the tax burden, getting that down

We need to look at the size of the state, getting that smaller. We need to look at our skills mix

as we bring net migration down, how our higher education is working, how universities are working

whether they're delivering. We need to get energy costs down because they're grossly uncompetitive

We need to get building not just houses but roads and reservoirs and railways and we need to tackle

welfare in a very significant manner. Now, if we can do all those things

we can create an economy that is much more vibrant, much more supportive of business

and can go out and create the wealth and the jobs and the tax payments

Mr Stride, sorry to interject. Sorry to interject. Since 2008, the party

who was in power for that time was your party So I mean first of all how do you expect people to trust the Conservatives But lastly you talking about a rewire of the economic model You had a chance and

indeed the nation had a chance, to have that very thing under Liz Truss. She says she was

stitched up by the OBR, the Bank of England, but you had that chance, and you yourself

Mr Stride, publicly denounced her. You didn't support Liz Truss in that endeavour. So it's

a bit ironic of you trying to talk about an economic rewire now when you had the golden

opportunity a few years ago? So the most important thing is if we're going to rewire the economy and

have an economy that is thriving and growing is we've got to act with fiscal responsibility. In

other words, the numbers have always got to add up. We can't just offer sweeping tax cuts, for

example, as reform are without explaining exactly how we're going to pay for those. And one of the

things I will be saying this morning is to recognise, as I said at the time, incidentally

that the approach that was taken at the back end of 2022 in that mini-budget was not fiscally responsible

And we have to own up to that and we have to be honest about that

because what this country needs is a party now that is going to have fiscal responsibility hardwired into its DNA

But you never gave her a chance, Mr Stride. That's going to be a Conservative Party. We will never take Sorry I having trouble hearing you Sorry apologies for interjecting You never gave Liz Truss a chance Many backbench Tory MPs and senior MPs turned on her and she was pushed into a corner

So you never gave Liz Truss's goal for growth a chance. The problem was fundamentally that if you go out there

with tens of billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts in what was then a fairly inflationary environment

you start to lose the confidence of the markets and then you start to lose control of the economy

Now, we very quickly put that right. Within a matter of weeks, we had settled things down again

But nonetheless, there was a lesson to be learned then. We have currently two parties

We have the Labour Party that is messing up the economy, taking all sorts of bad economic decisions

blowing their fiscal headroom, being economically irresponsible. We've got a reform party that is coming out

with all sorts of commitments that are completely unfunded, that will be economically ruinous

and fiscally irresponsible, we have to now be that party that will be absolutely ironclad

when it comes to having fiscal responsibility right at our heart. Never again will we come out with commitments that we cannot explain, how we can fund those

We need to maintain the confidence of markets, and that's exactly what our policies going forward are going to do