Clause 6 - Duty to specify assessed income period
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
10:45 am
Mr Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West, Labour)
Clause 6 is important because it lays out a Minister's ability to be able to set the assessment period at five years. That is highly significant because it is about time that we started to move away from talking about a means test and describing the state pension credit by that phrase.
I have talked to some in the voluntary sector who work with older people, all of whom welcomed the additional money that will be going into pensioners' pockets when the Bill becomes law. They all agree that what is crucial to the take-up of state pension credit is the need to get it into pensioners' heads that it is something to which they are entitled, that it will not be intrusive or demeaning, and that it will not affect their wish to live a dignified retirement, but rather quite the opposite because it will hugely enhance the quality of life of many pensioners across the country.
The points raised by Opposition Members in trying to draw a comparison between a state pension credit, in which there will be an assessment of pensioners' means every five years, and national assistance benefits, in which people face intrusive interference in their personal lives and minute inquiries into their personal circumstances, is ludicrous and damaging. The Bill will pass into law, and we should start using more realistic language when we talk about it and recognise that the burden of the so-called means test in the Bill bears no comparison with the kind of burden that lives in the memories of people from my part of the world as a result of means-testing in the 1930s.