Kemi Badenoch arrived in Birmingham on Saturday to open the Conservative Party conference with a Badenoch triple lock defence, insisting the policy was right for pensioners despite warnings from economists and a chorus of private dissent within her own party. The intervention came days after Andy Burnham set out a rival Labour position that would reshape how the state pension rises over time.
The triple lock guarantees that the state pension increases each year by whichever is highest: inflation, wage growth, or 2.5 per cent. Critics across the political spectrum have long argued the mechanism causes the pension to outpace wages over the long term, placing growing pressure on public finances.
Badenoch was direct when asked about those concerns. ‘The triple lock is our policy. We believe that this is the right policy for pensioners. That is what we have planned. That is what we have promised. There is nothing that has happened that has made me change my mind. That is our policy,’ she said.
Badenoch triple lock defence draws fire from within
The backdrop to her remarks was a leaked recording from the summer in which Katie Lam, now shadow communities secretary, said what the country would ‘need in the end is an entirely new pension system’. ‘I just think the whole system as it stands can’t stand for very much longer,’ Lam said in that recording. Badenoch was responding directly to those remarks in Sunday interviews, seeking to draw a line under what has become an awkward episode for the party heading into its annual gathering.
The internal tensions run deeper than Lam’s comments. Former Brexit minister Steve Baker criticised the party over an advertisement claiming Labour would ‘cut’ the pension, a claim he evidently found difficult to sustain given that Burnham’s proposed reform still guarantees the pension rises every year. In 2021, shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith, who was then a backbencher, wrote in Conservative Home that the triple lock was ‘unfair’ because pensioners could ‘gain from the misfortune of others’. ‘I hope that we can build consensus on what should not really be a subject of controversy but a sensible and pragmatic response to post pandemic management of the economy,’ Griffith wrote. Several other former Tory frontbenchers have also privately attacked the triple lock in recent months.
Burnham’s position has sharpened the debate. He said Labour would fight the next election on a promise to reform the triple lock so that it rose by 2.5 per cent or inflation each year while levelling with earnings growth over the long term. That formulation is designed to address the ‘ratcheting’ effect that economists across the political divide say will eventually cause the state pension to far outpace wages, leaving public finances exposed.
‘The Right Way’: Badenoch sets out Conservative principles
Beyond the pensions row, Badenoch used the Birmingham conference to launch a new intellectual paper intended to restate what she called ‘Conservative principles’. The paper, titled ‘The Right Way’ in a deliberate nod to Margaret Thatcher’s ‘The Right Approach’, sets out principles of wealth creation, freedom and responsibility, abiding by the law, and individual liberty.
The Tory leader was pointed about her party’s recent record. ‘We promised lower immigration without a strategy for delivering it. Net zero was legislated for before we had an economically feasible route to get there. We left the European Union without the economic plan that should have gone with it. The path to failure was paved with announcements, targets and good intentions,’ she said. Governments, she argued, should be judged on actions rather than intentions.
The conference also brought a policy commitment on childcare. According to the BBC, the Conservative Party pledged to scrap the £100,000 childcare ‘cliff edge’, a threshold at which families lose entitlement to support abruptly. The party said the change would cost approximately £700 million but would be covered by savings of £1.6 billion by 2029-30 generated by the same reform. The announcement was designed to show the party could offer costed, concrete policy alongside the broader philosophical repositioning Badenoch is attempting.
The Badenoch triple lock defence, meanwhile, is likely to remain contested territory as the conference week progresses, with several senior figures still privately unconvinced that the commitment is fiscally sustainable in the long run.
