Political View:  We aim to be effective opposition

For Labour and the Tories, their party conferences are mainly about projecting an image and showcasing their policies. The Liberal Democrat conference, from which I have just returned, does some of that but with one crucial difference: it is also the main decision making body of the party.

This year's Lib Dem conference had a mood of celebration, as we now have 72 MPs, the largest number for any third party for over 100 years, and that includes three new Lib Dem MPs in Cambridgeshire. In fact, if we had won just 117,000 more votes in the right places, we could have had 26 more MPs and replaced the Conservatives as the official opposition in Parliament.

Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, has said that the Lib Dems aim to be the "effective opposition" to the new Labour government, supporting them on things we agree with, urging them to go further and faster where necessary but also opposing them where they go wrong.

And one big mistake they have made in their first few weeks is on curtailing winter fuel allowances for pensioners. Yes, it is wrong that very wealthy pensioners get an allowance that they don't need but that could have been easily dealt with by HMRC by adjusting the tax codes of very high earners. Means testing the allowance will lead to millions of pensioners who are eligible failing to claim it and will also hit hard at pensioners who are on low incomes but just above the threshold for pension credit. It's a cruel, unnecessary policy and the Chancellor really does need to rethink it.

Peterborough's big expansion in the 1970s meant that for several decades we were a relatively young city. But now many thousands of the 1970s incomers and growing old and so pensions are becoming a much bigger issue for Peterborough people.

When in Government for five years from 2010 onwards, the Liberal Democrats did three positive things for older people. Firstly, we introduced the "pensions triple lock", which was so successful that all governments since, including the current one, have pledged to maintain it. Secondly, we doubled the basic rate tax allowance, which took over three million of the lowest earners, including many pensioners, out of paying income tax.

Regretably the Tories in recent years froze the tax allowance so progressively more and more of these people are being drawn back into paying tax. And thirdly, we introduced "Pension freedoms" which means that people with private or workplace pensions now have much more flexibility in when and how they take their pension benefits: including a tax free lump sum.

The new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has said she will "reform" workplace pensions to help fill the "black hole" in the public finances left by the previous Tory government. I hope she will be cautious in doing this, although she may want to reduce some of the very generous tax reliefs given to higher rate tax payers.

As a Liberal, I think it's important that people are given incentives to save for their own retirement, so that over time there will be less reliance on the state to provide pension benefits. Successive governments have broadly pursued this policy objective and it would be a retrograde step if the new Labour government chose to depart from it.