State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
10:32 am
Mr Tim Boswell (Daventry, Conservative)
May I echo the Minister's words in welcoming you to the Chair, Mr. Griffiths? Your co-Chairman—my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham—the Minister and I have debated at less convenient hours than this morning matters of considerable public importance in relation to employment law. I do not wish to signal to the Committee our determination necessarily to prolong affairs to such an extent. We want to have a proper businesslike discussion and deal with the main worries and detailed matters. As the Minister said, we had a discussion to that end in the Programming Sub-Committee, which reached a broadly successful conclusion and one that has been reinforced by the undertaking of the right hon. Gentleman this morning. The explications that he promised in his letter, but which were not enclosed with it, are not yet on the Table, but I sure that they will be placed there during our debate, although they are not relevant to today's discussions.
Although I do not want to make a meal of the programme resolution, for the avoidance of any doubt I wish to say—the Minister referred to it in the exchanges that we had in the House yesterday—that our reservations about the Bill remain. They were referred to in a reasoned amendment in the name of several members of the Committee, not all of whom were Conservative Members, when the Bill was discussed on Second Reading. We are concerned about mass means-testing, the complexity of the system and the possibility that many pensioners will miss out, that there will be an erosion of incentive to save and that additional expenditure could have been better directed towards the basic pension, especially for older pensioners. Such central worries will no doubt inform our arguments later in our proceedings.
Perhaps it would be appropriate, while the memory of yesterday's questions is still in our minds, to respond to the point that the Minister made after answering an interesting line of questioning. The hon. Member for Kettering (Phil Sawford) said, reasonably enough, that he was pleased that there was more money for pensioners, but thought that it could have been better spent on providing an uplift in the basic state pension. That is very much cognate with what we intended through our reasoned amendment on Second Reading, although the hon. Member for Kettering was unable to support us. The Minister then challenged me to say whether I was in favour of the extra money.