Schedule 1 - Administration
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
3:45 pm
Ms Maria Eagle (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Minister for Disabled People), Department for Work and Pensions; Liverpool, Garston, Labour)
I am somewhat relieved that the hon. Gentleman has given me a hint on what his amendment is about. He has just referred to ''difficult concepts'', and I was looking at it last night, trying to get my head around what ''foreseeable'' likelihood was. I was not sure whether he would be in the mood for a deeply philosophical or epistemological inquiry when discussing the schedule, or whether he just wanted to probe exactly what ''likelihood'' means.
I decided that I had better resort to a dictionary. The hon. Gentleman has told us something about the genesis of the amendment, and it was apparent once I had looked in the dictionary that that genesis was not there. I looked up ''foresee'', which should have been somewhere between ''forsake'' and ''forsooth'', but it was not. I did not get much help from ''Chambers English Dictionary'' or from the ''Oxford English Dictionary''. I resorted, as one does as an ex-lawyer, to a legal dictionary, and did not find the term in there either.
I then turned to ''likely'' and ''likelihood'', and got some succour from the legal dictionary about the meaning of likely, most of it from the Antipodes. There have been a lot of cases there about the meaning of likely, but general opinion seems to be that it means probable. I think that that is helpful. When we look in our own dictionaries, likely and likelihood are defined in terms of probability. The thesaurus included such terms as probable, possible, expected and to be expected. That is the kind of meaning that we are looking at, if that reassures the hon. Gentleman.
We are looking at something of a subjective test. We shall not be conducting some kind of Kafkaesque interrogation of the possible likely future with causal relationships having to be calculated at certain levels of probability. It is a commonsense test about what the claimant actually knows about a future of some uncertainty, a subjective test of his knowledge. The intention is not that the claimant must know of all changes in circumstances that are likely to occur, but that he should inform us of what he does know to be likely. We are not asking him to anticipate any strange change that might happen in certain unlikely circumstances and tell us about those in case it does. That would be a Kafkaesque world. It is a subjective test of what he knows is likely to happen.
As currently drafted, paragraph 3(3) would require a person to notify the Department of ''predictable'' changes in their circumstances. That means unsurprising, knowable changes. Any other interpretation would require speculation on the part of the claimant, which would clearly be unreasonable. We do not want to be unreasonable. Our decisions makers are by their nature reasonable, otherwise they will fall foul of the appeals process. By ''unreasonable'' I mean difficult or unfair. It is obvious that I had fun with my dictionary last night. I thought that I might as well look some words up while I had the books down from the Library shelves.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be reassured by what I have said. I am sorry not to have been able to find a definition of ''foresee'', but given that it was not there and given that he has explained to the Committee that it was a probing amendment in respect of reasonableness and the subjectiveness of the test, perhaps I can finish by saying, forsooth, I hope he will forsake his amendment.