Balls confirms Labour will vote for Osborne’s welfare cap next week

Today George Osborne confirmed that there will be a vote next week on a new welfare cap. This afternoon in a BBC interview with Huw Edwards, Ed Balls confirmed that Labour would be voting for the cap. Here’s the exchange:

Huw Edwards: The new welfare cap that was announced today of £119bn, are you voting for that?

Ed Balls: Yes, we’ll vote for that next Wednesday. We’ve supported the idea of a welfare cap. We have said that we should keep out the basic pension but include pensioner benefits. Clearly, we will do things differently from the government, for example we have said we will abolish the bedroom tax, we’ve shown how we will pay for that. We actually think our measures on housing and on young people and jobs can get the wider bill down. We’ll do things in a fairer way, but the idea of a welfare cap was proposed by Ed Miliband and we’ll support next Wednesday

That’s not particularly surprising – Ed Miliband outlined a welfare cap (excluding cyclical spending on things like jobseekers allowance) last year.