After the embarrassing defeat in the 2012 UK local elections, Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday pledged to ‘focus on what matters’, saying he got the message from the elections “loud and clear”.

The prime minister said he has no excuses such as low turnout and economic downturn to explain party’s poor performance at polls. “The message people are sending is this: focus on what matters, deliver what you promise - and prove yourself in the process. I get it,” said Cameron in an article written for the Daily Telegraph.

Cameron said voters wanted to know that the coalition was “not just a bunch of accountants”. He promised that now the coalition will focus on encouraging the “strivers, the battlers, the people with aspiration” and stop their lives becoming a “daily grind”. David Cameron said he will do more to help hard-working people who “want to get on and play by the rules”.

Meanwhile, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, said the coalition must “get on with” introducing House of Lords reform. “For more than a century, we have been debating the commonsense idea that the people who obey the laws of the land should elect the people who make them. Instead of getting ourselves tied up in knots in Westminster about this, we just need to get on with it”, he said.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, hinted that the government would procrastinate plans to reform the House of Lords as the Conservative leadership attempts to halt the increasingly bitter public attacks from their own ranks.

“I think what people are saying is: ‘Focus on the things that really matter, focus on the economy and on education and welfare. Focus on those things, don’t get distracted by too many other issues,” Osborne told the BBC.

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