James Lyons

So winter fuel, nobody objects to the principle of means testing winter fuel.

I think you would struggle to find anyone in this country who thinks that Alan Sugar deserves a winter fuel payment.

But what they didn't do was, well, they made two mistakes.

One, didn't argue the case for it, didn't set it up with, you know, a kind of independent commission or anything in the way that we've seen Pat McFadden do on kind of help for young people this week with Alan Milburn.

And then they set the cutoff point too low.

And the reason that they did that, I wasn't around at the time, is because DWP told them that the computers could only cope if it was at kind of the pension credit level or one of the kind of tax bans.

Obviously, that turned out to be wrong when challenged later on.

But that's why they ended up going too low.

It was a terrible U-turn, terribly executed.

So I can speak frankly about this because somebody leaked my views while I was sitting in Downing Street.

And I kept trying to explain internally that nobody was going to get any credit for this U-turn.

And actually what you needed to do was think what would Gordon Brown have done?

And I'll tell you what I think Gordon Brown would have done.

You had the winter fuel payments for pensioners and the pot for that had obviously shrunk a lot.

Then you actually have help with fuel bills for low-income families.

I'd have just mashed it together into a new benefit, given some more money back to pensioners, called it something completely new and claimed it was a huge success.

Well, apparently that was too difficult.

I won't go into the details, but it didn't happen.

And the government got no...

credit for it.