Clegg: 'Rich Pensioners May Lose Benefits'

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is expected to announce that it is time to look at whether wealthy pensioners should lose their state benefits.

In a speech later today defending the coalition's welfare reforms, Mr Clegg will insist that the Government has an "absolute duty" to ensure the system is fair to all.

He will say it will mean not paying out for "people who do not need it" and he will suggest that rich pensioners could lose their winter fuel payments and free bus passes before the next election.

While acknowledging the changes had at times been "painful and controversial", he will say that without reform, public support for the whole principle of welfare will be at risk of "total collapse".

With the welfare system they inherited from the former Labour government both badly designed and financially unaffordable, Mr Clegg will say the coalition had no choice but to carry through major changes.

"When two thirds of people think the benefits system is too generous and discourages work then it has to be changed, or we risk a total collapse in public support for welfare existing at all," he will tell the Centre Forum think tank.

"We need welfare protection for people who fall on hard times. Of course. But you cannot ask low income working people to pay through their taxes for people who aren't in work to live more comfortably than they do."

He will argue that Work and Pension Secretary Iain Duncan Smith's new Universal Credit - intended to ensure people are always better off in work than on benefits - was fully in line with those principles.

"I want us to keep at the front of our minds the idea that a liberal state is an enabling state," he will say.

Mr Clegg's speech comes after polls put the Lib Dems in fourth place

He will argue that people with medical conditions should be given the support they needed to get work, rather than being left to live on sickness benefits.

"Some conditions are so common that we simply cannot write sufferers off and pay them to stay at home," he will say.

"It is time for politicians and the benefits system to recognise that people with health conditions have just as much potential as everyone else if only they are given the help they need to get on."

However, in contrast to Chancellor George Osborne who said the Government should be there for the "strivers" and not "shirkers", he will accept that not everyone who cannot find a job is simply being lazy.

When the Conservatives proposed benefit cuts of £10bn in the Autumn Statement, the Lib Dems had acted as a moderating force, ensuring they were held to £3.8bn.

"Of course, there are some on the right who believe that no-one could possibly be out of work unless they're a scrounger," he will say.

"The siren voices of the Tory right who peddle this myth could have pulled a majority Conservative government in the direction of draconian welfare cuts."

Mr Clegg's speech comes at a difficult moment for the Lib Dems with a series of weekend opinion polls showing them slumping to fourth place behind the UK Independence Party, with their support down to just 8% or 9%.

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