The new Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell defended Cabinet colleague Alan Johnson, over campaign donations.

James Purnell MP, Work and Pensions Minister

ANDREW MARR: James Purnell is just 37 years old, but the new Work and Pensions Secretary has had an ear-popping rise since he first worked for Tony Blair when he was leader of the Opposition.

And then he was part of the team which swept into No. 10 in 1997, he gained a seat as an MP and was part of the select band of Blairites promoted by Gordon Brown to become Culture Secretary when power finally changed hands last year.

Now, he's been promoted from threatening the BBC to threatening the unemployed, and he joins me now.

JAMES PURNELL: Good morning.

ANDREW MARR: Good morning, thank you very much indeed for coming in.

Can I start off by asking you about Alan Johnson because he's been across the papers, people saying this is the next Peter Hain-like case, he's in real trouble, and he was I think the person that you supported for the deputy leadership.

JAMES PURNELL: I did support Alan and I've spoken to him about this and I do think it's been got a bit out of proportion. I mean this came out because his team were going through the whole of their campaign accounts and just double-checking which entries had appeared on which register.

They'd declared all of these to the Labour Party, they'd paid the levy that you have to pay on them, they'd declared them to the House of Commons Register.

They believed they declared them as well to the Electoral Commission but there were four that turned out not to be on there so for the avoidance of doubt they re-registered all of those declarations so, you know, they'd been working with the Electoral Commission on this and I don't think there's been wrongdoing.

ANDREW MARR: Did you ask about this business of there being a third party, the chap next door who gave him money but appears not to have known that he was giving him money?

JAMES PURNELL: Yeah, I mean, if you're accepting money your obligation is to check that they're on the electoral register. They did that, they checked that he was a Labour Party member, there was no reason to suspect anything about this and they're just as shocked as anybody else to read the comments in the paper.

ANDREW MARR: Now let's turn to your new job, you are as I said 37. If things don't turn round pretty quickly for this government you're going to spend your 40s in opposition, aren't you?

JAMES PURNELL: No I think, you know, the key thing when you're in politics is to not start double guessing the next election, that's sort of taking the electorate for granted. The key thing is to put a programme in front of people which, you know, they believe is the right one for the future and that's the job we'll be focusing on.

ANDREW MARR: But it's been an absolutely dreadful start to the year, I mean this was supposed to be the great Brown relaunch, and Peter Hain's resignation has just knocked it to one side.

JAMES PURNELL: Well of course it's a setback but, you know, I actually think if you look at what's been happening since the beginning of the year, the Prime Minister's speech on health reform which is a major reforming speech.

If you look at what's being said about welfare reform, we'll be saying tomorrow about that. If you look at the big decisions being taken on nuclear, that's really, in the end what people care about.

ANDREW MARR: Well do you think so, do you think they notice?

JAMES PURNELL: I think they do, I mean you know, we think within the Westminster bubble this is what everybody's talking about and of course it's sort of there in the background.

At election times people think "what have they done over the last four or five years, and what are they offering for the next four or five?" And that's, you know, I really do believe that's what the electorate make their mind up on in the end.

ANDREW MARR: Now you've got this new huge responsibility, it's been a very, very contentious area. Something like 200,000 to 300,000 people under 35, for instance, on invalidity benefit because of stress-related issues. Do you think there are really people who are unable to work?

JAMES PURNELL: There are people who are unable to work.

ANDREW MARR: Of that number, is what I'm talking about?

JAMES PURNELL: I mean, what we need to do is to separate out people who are unable to work from people who can And, you know, my vision for the Department is that we are all about giving people independence.

You know, if people can't work, giving them independence so they can live with their disability, so that they have control over the money that's given to them. You know, working with Alan Johnson on for example the idea of individual budgets where you give people the money which is being spent on them on their care, and they can decide, you know, who comes to look after them.

They can decide, you know, when the taxi comes to pick them up to take them to wherever they need to go. And then for people who can work, a clear obligation that they will need to work and that's, you know, that's what we've achieved for unemployment over the last few years. We've now got to the stage where full employment on the old definition has been reached, you know, we've got the lowest unemployment count for thirty years, over thirty years...

ANDREW MARR: You've still got 4.7 million people taking benefits, or unemployed, which given the fact that the economy has been doing well for ten years, is extraordinary.

JAMES PURNELL: Well actually what happened was in the 80s and 90s that went up from 1.2 million to 2.6 million. We've turned the corner. The number of people on incapacity benefit, the benefit you're talking about, is starting to fall for the first time. But what we're bringing in is a major programme of reform, a new benefit which is based on what people can do and that's exactly what I was talking about.

You separate people who can't work, but for people who can work we're going to require them to look for work, we're going to get a million people off incapacity benefit into work, 300,000 more lone parents into work, we'll bring down, for example, the age at which lone parents, the age of the children which lone parents have to work.

So at the moment your child can be up to 16 and as a lone parent you don't have to look for work. We're going to change that progressively so it's down to seven. So it's a major reform with the system and focusing in particular on inactivity, getting those four and a half million people on those benefits and helping them to get into work because a life lived without work is not a life fulfilled.

ANDREW MARR: Indeed. And tomorrow you're going to be talking about this, you have the Prime Minister standing shoulder to shoulder. Are you going to be saying anything that hasn't already been announced by either the Prime Minister or Peter Hain last year and the early stages of this year?

JAMES PURNELL: Well there's a Paper being published tomorrow which will have to go to Parliament so I can't go to that, but what we're saying very clearly is that the welfare system is there to view a way out of poverty, and then you get skills, have a way up the career ladder. You know, we don't want it to become a way of life, that's the big difference between now and the way the system used to work.

And, you know, the big reform which I want to bring in is to look at how we can use the private sector, the voluntary sector, as well as the public sector, to help people get into work because if they can bring in innovation, if they can bring a new approach in then it's our moral obligation to make sure we get the best service from people in this situation.

ANDREW MARR: It's just that, almost from the first day of New Labour people have been talking about this problem in very similar terms.

And it seems to a lot of people that you just can't as a government, as it were, get your fingers on the real problem. You can't reach down to those people who should be working and aren't working. You can't find a way of distinguishing them from those who really can't work.

JAMES PURNELL: Well I profoundly disagree with that, you know, that's the sort of talking about it as if it's year zero.

Actually over the last ten years we've gone from a situation where unemployment was the big problem, down to one where now we've reached full employment, you know, we used to even worry as the Labour Party about whether we could commit to aiming for full employment.

We've now reached it, we've got to a situation where we've got the lowest unemployment for over 30 years. We've also started to turn the corner on people who are on inactive benefits, on single parents for example, 300,000 more single parents who are working.

So, we achieved a huge amount, what we want to do now is to go from having, you know, the highest employment that we've ever had in this country, to having the highest of any country in the industrialised world.

ANDREW MARR: You're one of the young guns. Is this a tired government really just running out of ideas and people?

JAMES PURNELL: It doesn't feel like that to me. If you look at, you know, this big reform that the Prime Minister was talking about on individual budgets, taking money that is currently spent by Social Services without often asking people how they want it to be spent, and giving it to them in their own hands - giving people control over the services that they receive, giving people the power to affect their own lives.

That to me is not a tired government, it's an excited government. This is a government which is excited about the reforms that we're bringing in, and it's about a vision of making people independent. You know, the role of the welfare state is to help people flourish, to help them be independent, and that's my vision for my department.

ANDREW MARR: All right, well listen I hope we're going to hear a little bit more from you later on but for now James Purnell thank you very much indeed.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

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