Clause 10 - Effect of variations under section 7(4)
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
4:45 pm
Ms Maria Eagle (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Minister for Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Liverpool, Garston, Labour)
As long as it is within the next five years, his jacket will still be validly assessed.
Clause 10 allows us to keep abreast of the retirement provision. That means that although we are abolishing the old weekly means test we will still keep track of where the claimant's provision is, more or less. There will be no sudden end to entitlement after five years. If we just reassessed everything after five years, we might find that the entitlement was out of date. People might lose their pension credit after such a reassessment. The provisions enable us to keep track of where things are going.
The clause does not mean that pensioners must start filling in vast forms and sending in reams of details to update our assessment of their retirement provision, because we know, for example, that most second pensions are increased annually, and by what amount. When pensioners first apply, it will be possible for us to ask them when their second pension is uprated and
if there are rules on by how much it can be uprated. We will be able to deal with it ourselves without bothering them.