Shadow Scotland Secretary Andrew Bowie said Labour’s welfare reforms may have more support from Conservatives than Labour MPs, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of walking back on ambitious plans. Bowie outlined the need to balance supporting the vulnerable with getting more working-age people into employment, calling it a “difficult balancing act” that every government must tackle. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00It's incumbent on every government to do what it can to ensure that those people
00:04who are most vulnerable have the support they need. But it's also incumbent on
00:07every government to ensure that people of working age contribute to society,
00:10contribute to this country and contribute to our economy. It's a
00:14difficult balancing act but it's one that every government has to wrestle
00:17with and I very much hope that what we hear later on today is the Labour Party
00:20are taking this challenge seriously and they're going to do what they can to get
00:24control of an out-of-control welfare bill and get more people of working age
00:28into the workplace whilst of course continuing to support the most
00:31vulnerable in society. If those plans are as ambitious as our ones were when we
00:35went into the last election which was to reduce the welfare bill by £12 billion
00:38getting far more people of working age into the workplace then I
00:42suspect we'll have the broad support of the Conservative Party, probably more
00:45support on the Conservative benches than it has on the Labour benches. But it
00:48looks like Keir Starmer has walked back significantly from the ambitious plans
00:53that they were going to be setting out on welfare last week so as to placate
00:56the more left-wing elements of his own party and as I said we'll need to
01:02wait and see what the details are before we can actually comment but that would
01:04be disappointing if that were the case.