New clause 1 - Advice
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
Professor Steve Webb (Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
We have not yet reached paragraph (d), which provides for a ''reasonable period of time''. I get the impression that the travelling surgeries that the Department is talking about—the Age Concern session at the local library or sessions at the citizens advice bureau or the council office—may be held less often than weekly. I hope to clarify those matters. If we were dealing with the successor to income support, the poverty line safety-net benefit where people are not intended to go even a week without the bare minimum income, a delay of more than a week would be unreasonable.
I do not want the new clause to be too prescriptive. I want to probe and to see what is offered. However, I wish to raise two other issues about the Pension Service. Listening with care to both Ministers, one starts to capture their vision. It sounds really good, and I am sure that all members of the Committee welcome the idea of a proactive service. We have tabled amendments to other Bills saying that the onus should be on the Department to seek people out and to ensure that they get all that they are entitled to, and they have always been rejected. In the past, the argument has been that the onus is on the individual; it is not the Government's job to get benefits to people, but the people's job to claim benefits. I hope that I shall not be misunderstood if I welcome the reversal of that ethos to the extent that the Pension Service has reversed it.
However, my worry is how we are to get from the present culture of not always being proactive or clear to the promised land that the Minister has described. I reflected on that last night when I came across a letter that I had received from the Pension Service. It was on plain paper—I assume that the new letterhead has not been printed yet—and included this fragment of a sentence, from a decision maker at Bristol East Pension Service:
''We should not chase up capital details if the capital is under £5,500''.
Fair enough, but it continues:
''user case controls should be set to box on annual reviews that do not need to be carried out until the system has been upgraded.''
User case controls should be set to box? I have read that half a dozen times and I do not have a clue what the letter means. I will not name the individual who wrote it; that would be unfair. My point is that there is an existing culture, a bureaucracy—