In his first interview as Labour’s presumptive Prime Minister, Andy Burnham told the Sunday Times that one issue kept coming up on the doorstep in Makerfield: the frozen £12,570 personal allowance. He called it a growing issue. Within days of walking into Downing Street he had told the Financial Times there was no commitment to do anything about it.

That is a let down for anyone earning near the threshold. It is also a gap in the defence, and we should run through it.

He raised the subject, then walked away from it

Politicians do not usually hand their opponents a grievance. Burnham did. He spent months telling voters that the freeze was unfair, that it was dragging people who are not well off into paying tax they should never have paid, and that Westminster was not listening. He was right. Westminster was not listening. Unfortunately, having become the boss himself, he has proved that it still is not.

What he offered instead was an £850 million package taking VAT off household electricity. It is worth about £45 off a typical annual bill, and rather more than that if you are wealthy enough to own a large house and use a lot of power. It is planned for this financial year only. And because the saving rises with the amount you use, it gives nobody any reason at all to take less from the grid. Alongside it came a cut in the bus fare cap to £2 and a month of free travel for under 15s.

Cheaper buses are good. Lower bills are good for households, even if they are not necessarily good for the environment. But set it against the freeze, which now runs to April 2031, and the sums do not work. Our own figures show 1.9 million more people being dragged into the higher rate between 2025 and 2030. Victoria Collins has costed the wider threshold freeze at £67 billion a year for ten million taxpayers by the end of the decade. Against that, £45 for one winter is a press release, not a plan.

Voters are perfectly capable of doing that arithmetic. They will do it in October when the bills arrive.

The policy is already ours

Here is the part we keep forgetting. We do not need to invent anything. What we need to do is stop saying five words: “when the public finances allow”.

That caveat kills the policy. It turns a principle into a wish. No number, no date, and no answer to the only question anyone ever asks.

Because the policy itself is strong. Raising the personal allowance is the single most successful thing we did in government. Between 2010 and 2015 we lifted more than three million people out of income tax altogether. Not by means testing. Not by a scheme people had to apply for. Just by letting people keep more of what they earned before the state took any of it.

Daisy Cooper has restated it since. She has called raising the tax free allowance the best and fairest way of cutting tax, before adding those five fatal words. Ed Davey has been clear that the freeze hits the lowest paid hardest. The analysis is done. The moral case is made. The record is there to point at. And then we hedge.

So we are not asking the party to adopt a new position. We are asking it to kill the caveat and cost the policy.

Burnham fell into the same hole

Because that is exactly what he did. He said the freeze was a problem, then said he could not fund fixing it, then found £3.5 billion for a separate tax break for young workers and £850 million for a one year VAT cut. The money exists. What was missing was the decision.

If we keep using the same formula, we will be standing in the same place he is, saying the same thing, and voters will not be able to tell us apart. Two parties agreeing that something would be nice is not a dividing line.

What running through the gap looks like

Briefly, because it deserves a piece of its own, and I will write one.

We should stop promising to raise the allowance and start promising to unfreeze it. A frozen threshold is a tax rise that nobody has to vote for. It arrives every April and no minister ever has to defend it. Make indexation the default, and make any Chancellor who wants to freeze thresholds legislate for it in the open and call it what it is.

Then pay for it honestly, by taxing income from assets more like income from work. A nurse pays more on her earnings than a landlord pays on his gains, and no liberal should be comfortable defending that.

That is a mechanism, a direction, and a named source of funds. It is not a complete costing and I will not pretend it is. But it is more than either of the other parties is offering, and it is more than we have offered for two years.

Gaps close

This will not stay open. He has deferred this, not abandoned it. He told his cabinet that the VAT cut points the way to further measures he hopes to take, and he has a Budget in which to take them. He is absorbing a small hit now, in July, when few people are watching, and buying himself the option of a funded announcement in the autumn when they are. If he does that having watched us say nothing specific for six months, he takes the credit for a policy that was ours first.

We got there first. That is not the same as owning it. Ownership goes to whoever is willing to say what it costs and stand behind the answer.

The gap is open now. Let us not stand around admiring it. Let us run through it.

* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames