Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 8 hours ago
Conservative MP David Reed calls on the government to reintroduce the two-child benefit cap, and to redirect that money to defence spending. Reed also says the "size of the state" needs to be reduced and the number of civil servants in the Ministry of Defence reviewed. Report by Keechl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00So there are a number of areas that we need to look at.
00:03Kemi has already announced that the two-child benefit cap that was reintroduced, sorry, that was scrapped under Labour, needs
00:13to be reviewed.
00:15And the money from that policy needs to be brought into defence and also saved to bring down our government
00:22deficit.
00:23Now, that's just one area that we need to look at. But there are other areas across welfare spending that
00:29we need to have a hard conversation with the public about.
00:32But we also need to talk about the size of the state. So if we look at the Ministry of
00:36Defence, we have 55,000 Ministry of Defence civil servants.
00:40And I'm a former public sector worker for a period of time. I've worked with many fantastic MOD civil servants.
00:47But when you have 55,000 MOD civil servants and you can't get a fully functional destroyer out to defend
00:54a sovereign base area in Cyprus, as we've seen in recent months, the equation doesn't really work.
Comments

Recommended