WINTER FUEL PAYMENTS ‘NOT THE LAST DIFFICULT DECISION’ GOVERNMENT WILL TAKE, SAYS TREASURY SECRETARY
TREASURY Secretary James Murray has said the government will need to make “difficult decisions” after it announced that winter fuel payments for ten million pensioners will be scrapped.
He warned it was not the last difficult decision the government would have to take as it pledged to get public finances back under control.
Murray told GB News: “I think working families will never forgive the Conservatives for what they did to the economy. We’ve got into office, we knew that we were going to inherit an incredibly difficult set of circumstances.
“But then, when the Chancellor took office, she asked the Treasury to do an audit of exactly what our inheritance was, and it’s now shown there is a £22 billion black hole this year.
“This is not money further down the line that needs to be found. This is money being spent this year by the government.
“It’s absolutely outrageous that the government let this happen without telling anyone. They covered it up by not being straight with the OBR, not being straight with the British public talking about this in the election campaign.
“We’re now in a situation where we are in office and we will fix it and that’s the process the Chancellor began…saying, ‘look, it’s a mess, let’s be straight with the British people’.
“There are going to be some difficult decisions, but we will fix it.
“It’s a terrible time for people right across the country, given the economic inheritance that we’ve had from the previous government. But what the Chancellor set out…is her first step in the process to bring economic stability back to the British economy.
“We know that if you don’t have economic stability, you can’t get the economy growing, and economic growth is the way that we will make people across Britain better off and get our public services back on a sustainable footing.
“So making sure we rein in the public finances after this mess we’ve inherited, getting economic stability back at the heart of government is absolutely crucial to what we want to do.
“I want to be really honest with you and say that that decision about the winter fuel payment was a really difficult one. It’s not one any of us wanted to take. It’s not one the Chancellor was expecting to take coming into office.
“But having sound finances, being fiscally responsible, having economic stability, is not an optional extra for us. It’s at the heart of what we want to do in government, and that’s why we’re having to take difficult decisions.
“This is not going to be the last difficult decision we’re going to have to take to get the public finances back under control.”
