Clause 1 - Entitlement
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
10:32 am
Mr Tim Boswell (Daventry, Conservative)
Thank you, Mr. Griffiths, for starting us off on a good note. The amendments are possibly both trivial and profound simultaneously—trivial because they relate to a piece of nomenclature and drafting, and profound in that they expose some of the details and equivocations of the strategy behind the Bill.
It is obvious, even to a casual observer, that amendments Nos. 9, 10, 11 and 12 all have the same effect in their different places—to leave out ''state'' in state pension credit. It is not easy or even possible to amend the short or long title or, indeed, any of the rubrics to a Bill, such as that which appears on line 1:
''State pension credit: entitlement and amount''.
One can only amend the text of the Bill. The amendments seek to probe an apparently minor matter—what the benefits to be derived from the Bill will be called. It is odd that the word ''state'' is inserted before the words ''pension credit'', not least because Ministers made it clear in the points of guidance, including the Select Committee Report, that the benefit would be called the pension credit. We now find that it has an unnecessarily long and pompous title in the formal presentation.
I also have reservations about why the benefit is called a state credit. I rehearse each day whether I understand how the Bill works, and I think that I do—at least for parts of the day.