Labour minister Lisa Nandy flapped tonight as she appeared to refuse to be able to answer a simple question from the audience about how her party would tackle the problem of getting people back into work.
The MP appeared alongside Jacob Rees-Mogg, Mariella Frostrup, Rory Stewart and Anand Menon with the episode of the show from London presented by Fiona Bruce.
An audience member asked “is the carrot approach of supporting people into work better than the stick of cutting benefits?”, and Ms Bruce offered the question to Ms Nandy mentioning that the UK is the “only major economy where the employment rate has fallen”.
The BBC presenter added that there had been lots of announcements about the “carrot” this week for the unemployed in relation to access to mental health and improvements to job centres, but Ms Bruce said: “Do you think there needs to be a stick?”
Ms Nandy, the MP for Wigan, said: “What we announced this week is that you’ve got nearly a million young people who are out of work. There not in work, there not in education, they’re not in training, which we think is a national scandal, I don’t think anyone can be happy with that situation.
“And you’ve also got around 2.8 million people who aren’t in work because they’re too sick to work. Now one of the ways that you tackle that is what we’ve announced in the budget this week which is reform and investment into the national health service.”
Ms Nandy continued talking about a “million young people who would kill for opportunities to work”, but Ms Bruce interjected pointing out “it’s not just young people Lisa, is it, and you promise, or the Government has promised, an overhaul of the disability benefits system”.
Ms Nandy claimed this was not what was “announced this week” and said it was about reforming the job centres, but again Ms Bruce had to point out Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, had said it was about an “overhaul” and that Labour had pledged to cut “£3billion from the welfare bill”. She asked Ms Nandy once more: “How are you going to do that?”
Ms Nandy appeared to smile and shake her head as Ms Bruce was talking and answered rather confusingly: “I will answer your question, but I do really want to address the question.”
Ms Bruce replied: “The question is about carrot and stick, I am asking what is the stick?”
Flustered, Ms Nandy said: “I’m trying to get to it, because you know people, I feel the frustration all the time. People don’t want to know whose fault it was, they want to know how we are going to fix it.”
Ms Nandy, who is the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, then talked about working with Channel 4 and the Premier League, before she seemed to finally get to the point and said: “If people don’t take up those opportunities, we have also said that we will not pay benefits to those people.”
A frustrated Ms Bruce pointed out “that happens already” in that when people don’t accept jobs they can “be sanctioned”, and asked Ms Nandy again what Labour were doing “that’s different?”.
