Speaking as one of the guests on The Agenda with Tom Bradby broadcast on ITV last night, Ed Balls responded to a question on whether he agreed with John Lewis MD Andy Street's comments last week about France: Mr Balls said "In these days it is an anachronism that the shops aren't open on a Sunday and that things seem to shut down all of August. So I think it does need reform. We are living longer, the retirement age needs to go up. That is something which we did in Britain and it's cross-party consensus to face up to these big reforms. The French haven't done it. Today the prime minister from France has been in Britain saying they are going to now reform but we have heard that talk before. I do think we need some action."
He added: "The problem is we have had Labour and Conservative prime ministers and governments in Britain who have reformed our labour market. We have made things more flexible and we have raised the retirement age - and French presidents, not just Hollande, presidents before him, have also not bitten the bullet of reform for the 21st century and they are going to have to do so or the advantage they have got in terms of higher productivity is going to go away.
Asked about mansion tax he said: "These are for only for the highest value properties. Even in London these are only a minority of properties. The threshold will be indexed by house price inflation not ordinary inflation. There will be special rules for a minority of people who have a big house but very little income. There's ways in which you can allow people to defer the payments rather than having to make them each year."
Mr Balls dismissed the idea of waiving mansion tax for people who have owned their properties for a certain length of time, such as more than ten years. He said: "No that's not something that we could police."
Asked about his reaction to Ed Milliband's omission of the deficit in his Labour conference speech Mr Balls said: "Well I had seen the speech a couple of weeks ago so it's one of those things where sometimes in life you can forget the most important things. In that speech, not talking about the deficit." He added: "I knew what was in the speech and therefore I was surprised momentarily. I was surprised, but we are where we are. It's a really hard thing to stand up and make big speeches like that and do it from memory. I think if he could do the speech again it would be in. I think he was as annoyed by it as anybody would be."
