Clause 6 - Duty to specify assessed income period
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
10:45 am
Mr Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West, Labour)
As we know from the last Government, pensioners can be subject to whims and ideology. The last Conservative Government made perhaps the most significant breach from the pattern of pension provision since the war when they broke the earnings link with the state pension many years ago.
Providing that those reports are the minimum required, simple and well understood, I do not see
them as an intrusive and unnecessary burden. It is not unreasonable to expect people to be able to make them. When one gets down to the minutiae of people's business and they are expected to report on a weekly basis, one can talk about a means test in the sense that people are trying to portray.