The Labour Government’s winter fuel raid was “inescapable”, a Cabinet minister insisted.

Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, defended Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s decision to strip the winter fuel allowance from around 10 million pensioners from this winter.

Mr McFadden told BBC Radio 5 Live: “I understand why some people say that we’d rather that we hadn’t had to take this decision, in a way I feel that way myself.

“But we find ourselves in a very difficult position, where the previous government had to spend the whole of the reserves for this year within three months…Look, it’s a difficult decision, I understand that, and I know there’ll be opposition to some of these things.

“But let me make another point about this. Getting the public finances sorted is an inescapable duty of government. You can’t just run away from it. And we know what happened when people tried to run away from it.”

Sir Keir will address the party faithful at 2pm today on the penultimate day of Labour’s annual party conference in Liverpool.