Six questions we asked Nick Clegg (and the answers he gave us)

We were allotted five minutes on the phone to question the Lib Dem leader, who was keen to highlight what he called the threat of a ‘BLUKIP’ alliance of hard liners after the election.

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In the event, he gave us almost 10 minutes and fielded queries from readers as well as from the Echo.

Nick Clegg: I’m on our banana yellow bus hopping along the M4 so if I get cut off I’ll ring you back. But the reason I just quickly wanted to ring is that I’m obviously acutely aware of the Liberal Democrat-Conservative contest in parts of Dorset and whilst there’s quite rightly been a lot of attention devoted to the danger of a Labour/Scottish National Party alliance to people and families in Dorset and indeed the South West as a whole, I don’t think nearly enough attention has been devoted to the rival danger of a hard line right-wing alliance governing our country after May 7 if people vote for the Conservatives rather than the Liberal Democrats.

I’m acutely aware that folk in Dorset are being told by the Conservatives that they should vote Conservative to have a Conservative government, but of course that’s simply not going to happen because everybody knows the Conservatives are not and cannot win the general election. David Cameron might want to pretend otherwise but it’s just not going to happen.

So the question is not: Is David Cameron or Ed Miliband going to walk into Number 10?. One of them will do. Actually the big question in the final stages of the election campaign for folk in Dorset is: Who do you want alongside them? Do you want Alex Salmond with Ed Miliband? Do you want Nigel Farage dictating terms to a hapless David Cameron? Or do you want Liberal Democrats making sure that we continue to act fairly from the centre ground? That is really quite a big choice for people to make in Dorset and elsewhere.

Q: That leads us on to one of the things I wanted to ask which was how things will be any different with Vikki Slade as your MP than Michael Tomlinson for the Conservatives. Obviously last time it was closely fought but people ended up with a coalition of the two contenders anyway.

Clegg: Vikki will firstly be a brilliant local MP herself and I hope you acknowledge she’s a popular local figure. She’s a wonderful local campaigner, she knows every blade of grass, every square inch of the area, but crucially her rival will tell you that he wants a Conservative government to be elected but what he won’t tell you is there’s no chance of a Conservative government being elected so they’ll have to rely on Nigel Farage, on the Democratic Unionist Party and basically have their rather extreme hard line characters on the back benches of the Conservative party imposing ever more severe and ideological cuts on local public services in Dorset.

That’s the consequence and we have shown as a party over the last five years that we can govern from the sensible centre ground, that we can maintain a strong, stable and fair government. That’s why we have delivered, as you know, better apprenticeships, childcare, better taxes, more money for local schools through the pupil premium, pension reforms and so on. I just worry terribly that a vote for the Conservatives in Dorset rather than for Vikki would lead to something that most people in the constituency simply don’t’ want, which is a hard line ideological ‘BLUKIP’ alliance imposing huge cuts on local public services.

Q: I was at party conference in 2008 in Bournemouth when you got a lot of applause for talking about child poverty. You said it was a disgrace that one in three children were growing up in poverty in Britain. The figure is still the same, one in three, and David Cameron gets a hard time over the fact that there were a million visits to foodbanks over the last year. Do you accept that you’ve got some failure to account for in that respect?

Clegg: Relative child poverty has actually gone down, not up, firstly.

Secondly, just before Christmas, one of my proudest moments in government was when official statistics showed the attainment gap, the educational performance, between poorer kids and wealthier kids, is actually closing in our school system for the first time in a very long period of time and the evidence showed that’s because of Liberal Democrat policies like the pupil premium, like giving a healthy lunchtime to all little children in the first two years of primary school, which as you may know is particularly aimed at those four in 10 children who are in poverty but didn’t formerly receive free school meals.

Taking three million taxpayers on low pay out of paying income tax, keeping more money in their pocket, allows them to look after their children better. For the first time ever, families from the 40 per cent lowest income families with two-year-old toddlers get 15 hours’ free pre-school support, something which we want to expand on and the Conservatives do not. These are things which are very often entirely overlooked in some of the statistics that are bandied around but they actually show that we are investing more, not less, money in a child’s life when it makes the biggest difference, when they are very small.

Q from reader Leonard Litten: You said every working person would pay less tax with the higher tax threshold, but as a working pensioner I now pay more tax. They don’t shout that from the rooftops.

Clegg: As you know, the income tax allowance for pensioners has always been higher than other taxpayers. We’ve now brought the new tax-free allowance to roughly where the pensioner allowance has been, so as we go further in the next parliament, you pay no income tax on the first £12,500 you have. That will, for the first time, massively benefit pensioners as well.

Q from reader Giovanna Vaczi: I would like to know why we have to sell the family home to care for my mum, who has Alzheimers. My mum and dad have worked all their lives.

Clegg: That’s exactly why we need to put in place this cap on care costs after the Dilnot Commission to make sure people don’t have to sell their homes to fund care costs and why it’s also important we give people who care for elderly relatives some recognition. That’s why we’ve said that we’re going to give all carers a £250 carers’ bonus. Of course, there’s no money enough to acknowledge the extraordinary sacrifice of carers who put their own life on hold to look after people who are more vulnerable than them. But at least it goes some way to giving some recognition to the role that carers play and giving them some respite from those pressures as well.

Q from reader Louise Sanders: Why did you lie about tuition fees? Do you think it’s fair that students have to pay over £9,000 a year when you yourself didn’t have to pay a penny?

Clegg: Students under the Labour system – and of course the Labour party is always very quick to forget that they introduced fees and then increased them – thousands of students had to pay up front and ask their mum and dad to contribute. We’ve got rid of that so you pay nothing as a student, you only pay back long after you’ve graduated and can afford to do so.

So if you graduate nowadays and let’s say you’re on a graduate salary of £24,000, under the old system which Labour had, you would pay about £66 a month back. Now you pay a third, £22 a month. You might pay longer but you actually pay much less. And so that’s the great irony.

I understand a lot of the anger and the disappointment about the original decision but I do think when you look at the facts, the system is much fairer than people allege it to be, and that’s one of the reasons why we now have more youngsters on full time university courses than ever before and more youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds and black minority ethnic backgrounds in university than ever before.

Q: I want to quickly ask about mental health. The Daily Echo has campaigned about it and the suggestion has been that particularly for children and young people, the mental health system isn’t good enough. Would you accept that that’s the case?

Clegg: I would go further than that. I think it’s an absolute travesty the way mental health services, particularly but not exclusively for children and adolescents, have been treated like a Cinderella service by governments for decades. What I’m trying to do now is start a process which has to reverse generations of discrimination against mental health and we’ve made a start.

I put £400million into expanding talking therapies, £150m to give help to teenagers with eating disorders, myself. As of this month, for the first time ever, if you suffer from psychosis or depression, you will be seen according to new access and waiting time standards that have long existed for physical health conditions but until now were never introduced in mental health.

So we’ve made a start but I want to go further. That’s why I recently announced a £1.25billion transformation fund which will transform children and adolescent mental health services during the course of the next parliament.