Sunak’s triple lock pledge could mean pension age rising to 68 earlier, Tory ex-ministers warn – UK politics live | Politics

A minister has claimed that “credulous clerics and lefty lawyers” are helping people abuse the asylum system.

Andrew Griffith, the science minister, made the comment this morning in the light of revelations about how Abdul Ezedi, the man accused of being responsible for the Clapham chemical attack, came to be granted asylum.

As Matthew Weaver reports, Ezedi was granted asylum by a judge who accepted he was a Christian convert despite concerns about his honesty, court documents have revealed.

Griffith was doing an interview round on behalf of the government this morning and he told Sky News that cases like this showed why the government was right to be changing he asylum system. He said:

We can’t run an asylum system based on credulous clerics and lefty lawyers. That is why we are fundamentally reforming it.

People like the case you mentioned [Ezedi] … should not be here, because we want to get to a position, it is very clear, if you come here illegally from a safe country, France is a safe country, it is a fellow member of the G7, it is a member of the European Union, it has signed all of the same treaties to protect refugees that the UK has, so if you come here illegally, you will not be able to say.

That would apply to this case, as it would many other cases that people are concerned about.

That is the law that we are trying to get through the House of Lords right now. We are a couple of busloads of peers away in terms of the votes to be able to get that through the House of Lords and then that will create the system that we want that would have prevented this tragic case.

Parliamentary pressure is building on the UK government to ban arms sales to Israel, amid signs that Israel intends to ignore the UN security council resolution passed this week calling on all sides to commit to a ceasefire, Patrick Wintour reports.

The Labour party has said that water company bosses should not be getting bonuses if their firms are still polluting rivers and the sea. It has also said they should be criminally liable for repeated failures to tackle pollution.

In the light of today’s figures showing raw sewage discharges have more than doubled in the past year, Labour is saying these sanctions should be introduced immediately. Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, said:

The Conservatives’ are too weak to get tough with polluting water companies.

Instead of imposing Labour’s ban on water bosses’ bonuses, Steve Barclay [the environment secretary] has weakly chosen to only talk about doing it.

The evidence is clear. We don’t need the dither and delay of a consultation, we need immediate action.

That is why Labour will put the water companies under tough special measures. We will strengthen regulation so law-breaking water bosses face criminal charges, and give the regulator new powers to block the payment of bonuses until water bosses have cleaned up their filth.

Good morning. One sure sign that an election is on the way is that pensions increasingly become a topic of political conversation. At the weekend Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, said that keeping the pension triple lock would be in the Conservative party’s manifesto. At the liaison committee yesterday the Tory MP Stephen Crabb asked Rishi Sunak to confirm that he wanted to keep it in place for the whole of the next parliament. Struggling to suppress his belief that this was a daft question, because the answer was obvious, Sunak replied that it was safe for Crabb to assume that the answer was yes.

The triple lock is a pledge to increase the value of the annual state pension every year in line with earnings, inflation, or by 2.5% – whichever is higher. Introduced by the coalition government, it is designed to ensure that pensioners never start falling behind other groups in terms of living standards. Over the last decade it has helped pensioners considerably, and you can see why Sunak wants it in the manifesto. But it does not come cheap.

Today the i points out that Sunak cannot make this promise without inviting awkward questions about when the age at which people can start getting the state pension will rise from 66 (the current age) to 68. It is going up to 67 later this decade, and is currently due to rise to 68 in the 2040s. Last year a report said the government should bring forward the rise to 68 by three years, but Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, announced he was postponing the decision until the next parliament.

In her i story, Alexa Phillips quotes two of the Conservative party’s best experts on pensions as saying that keeping the triple lock in place for another five years could mean the rise in the state pension age to 68 having to happen earlier. David Willetts, a former minister who is now president of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, told the i that the coalition government was only able to afford the triple lock because the state pension age was going up. He said:

The argument was, if we speed up the increase in the pension age, there will be fewer pensioners, and we’ll be able to pay them a higher pension.

That was the trade-off on which the triple lock rested when it was first introduced, and it is a reminder that somehow or other these pledges have to be paid for, even with unpalatable measures like that which have come back and proved to be very controversial.

And David Gauke, a former work and pensions secretary, told the i that Sunak’s promise would mean the government having to revist the state pension age decision. He said:

The triple lock proved to be more expensive in practice than was anticipated when the policy was first announced, just because of the way in which the economy operated after 2010. It did more to increase the value of the state pension than anyone had thought was likely.

Ultimately, governments are going to have to take into account the wider fiscal situation. If you prioritise the increase in the state pension, then one way you can address that is by looking at the age in which it comes into play.

Why is this so salient as an election issue? Because pensioners are far more likely to vote than other age groups. This chart, from a British Election Study report, illustrates this, with turnout figures for the last three general elections, by age group.

The Commons is in recess, and it looks as if it may be a quiet day at Westminster. Here are some of the things in the diary.

Morning: The Environment Agency publishes sewage discharge figures.

Morning: Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, meets mayors and mayoral candidates in the west Midlands.

Afternoon: Peers debate the second reading of the leasehold and freehold reform bill.

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