Lord Frost suggests the state pension age should be raised to 75 to shrink public spending
- Tory Grandee says PM should use conference speech to set out vision for society
Lord Frost yesterday suggested that the state pension age should be raised to 75 to shrink public spending and the state.
The Tory grandee, who was former PM Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, made the remarks at a party conference fringe meeting on the Future of Conservatism.
Urging ministers to make cuts to public spending and taxes and go for growth, he acknowledged that this would require making changes to the state pension.
He said: ‘I do think that the honest truth is that the pension age is going to have to go up quite a long way to solve this problem [of reducing public expenditure].
‘That seems to me the best way of getting out of it in the medium term.’
Lord Frost urged the Government to make public spending cuts while raising the state pension age to 75, at a fringe meeting on the Future of Conservatism
Asked whether it should go up to 70 years old, he said: ’75, it’s quite a lot higher.’
He added: ‘People are much healthier than they used to be and I think it does need to go up. The big blocks of spending are health, pension and benefits. If you don’t tackle those you’re not really tackling anything.
‘I do think you need to do something also like freezing – or coming close to freezing – the public sector health budget and finding a sort of socially just and accepted way that future spending needs to go to the private sector in some way otherwise it’s just going to absorb sort of half of the budget before too long.’
He also hit out at Rishi Sunak’s ‘managerial’ style of leadership.
The Tory grandee added that the Prime Minister should use his keynote speech tomorrow to ‘paint a picture’ of how a Conservative Britain differs from a Labour vision
Asked what he wanted to hear in Mr Sunak’s conference speech tomorrow, he added: ‘Please paint a picture of how Conservative Britain, if we win again, is different from Labour Britain.
‘What is your vision of society? How should it work? What’s the role of government and the individual? What is Conservative Britain about?
‘You always knew that with Mrs Thatcher, what she wanted to create and we’re not getting that.
‘I would also like us to commit to a tax cut before the next election and the spending cuts that go with it.’
The state pension age is currently 66. In March, ministers delayed a decision on when a rise in the state pension age should kick-in.
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