A tough crackdown on welfare spending is the only way to maintain police numbers and other frontline services, David Cameron said today.
The Prime Minister gave his most explicit warning that frontline services would suffer unless the Government saved billions of pounds in its proposed benefits squeeze.
Mr Cameron said: “Members opposite have got to start getting serious about the task that we face. We want to do everything we can to keep police officers on the streets, to have money going into our schools, to keep up spending on our hospitals and the only way we are going to be able to do it is if we deal with the problems of excessive welfare spending.”
He was responding to a question from Labour’s Karen Buck about whether there would be fewer police officers on the streets at the end of the Parliament.
In yesterday’s Budget George Osborne warned that most Whitehall departments, including the Home Office, would face cuts of more than 25 per cent in their budgets to pay for bringing down the deficit.
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Mr Cameron said Labour “have got to get serious about the task we face”. He said the only way to maintain police numbers was to bring down the benefits bill.
Government officials confirmed today that the bigger the savings made on benfits the more room for manoeuvre other departments would have.
During rowdy exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions, Harriet Harman accused the Government of misleading pensioners and taking money away from familes earning less than £30,000 with its hit on tax credits.
The acting Labour leader said pensioners would gain nothing extra in 2011-12 from the decision to restore the link between state pensions and earnings because no money had been set aside from it.
Mr Cameron insisted that the Treasury’s Red Book showed £1 billion budgeted for higher pensions over the course of the parliament. Mr Osborne has promised the pension will rise by at least 2.5 per cent even if inflation or earnings increases are running at a lower level
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“What a contrast,” Mr Cameron said. “In 13 years Labour never linked the pension back to earnings. We’ve done it in two months.”
He added: “The whole country can see what’s happening here. One party put us into this mess. Two parties are working together to get us out of it.”
The Prime Minister referred to Labour backbench MPs as “dupes” because he said they had not realised the plans of their own frontbench had been to increase pensions by less than the most conservative measure of inflation.
The Speaker, asked to rule on whether “dupes” constituted unparliamentary language, said: “It is a matter of taste. We will have to leave it there.”