Schedule 2 - Minor and consequential amendments
State Pension Credit Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
Mr Ian McCartney (Minister for pensions, Department for Work and Pensions; Makerfield, Labour)
As part of the normalities of ending Committees, I shall be brief and I know that the hon. Member for Daventry will do the same. I do not want to detain our colleagues too long, but it is important that I make a number of points. The Committee does not simply do its work and go away again. A lot of effort is put in by many people behind the scenes, to whom I pay tribute.
You and I, Mr. Atkinson, have been rattling around the House and this Corridor for some considerable years. Indeed, in recent years, you have chaired virtually all those occasions when I have been dealing with the legislative programme as a Minister, and you have kept me on the straight and narrow. I am also grateful to your colleague, Mr. Griffiths. I hope that he will survive the consequences of chairing the Committee.
The hon. Member for Daventry and I have a similar relationship. I do not know why, but every time there is a reshuffle in the Government or the Opposition, we telephone each other to check whether colleagues are still around. For a short period, the two of us were broken apart and became broken-hearted: when I had to go to the Cabinet Office, the hon. Gentleman was not allowed to follow me. However, we have been put
together again, and I look forward to more discussions with him over many years.
On behalf of us all, I thank the Clerk and the Hansard writers. I particularly thank the Clerk for the assistance and advice that he gives hon. Members. Without that, the Committee could not operate effectively.
I thank my hon. Friends for their support. A number of them have worked on Bills with me before, but for others, it is their first time. Indeed, some of my hon. Friends are in the House for the first time, having worked in other places, including Downing street and the Labour party. They used to write my speeches; now they have to sit and listen to them, so I thank them.
That reminds me of a comment made way back in the dark years about the Labour party national executive. ''What is this committee?'', it was asked. Someone replied, ''It is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.'' I hope that that is not how people perceive this Committee. I hope that we have been fit for the purpose and have done what is necessary for pensioners.
I say to Opposition Members that the whole point of parliamentary democracy is to have accountable Governments and to enable Oppositions to hold them to account. I usually give awards on these occasions, and the award for the best Government reply on the Bill goes to the hon. Member for Northavon, who beat both me and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary with the reply that he gave this afternoon. I have to give the award for the best Opposition speech to the hon. Member for Hertsmere for getting out of the first commitment given by the Opposition. Whatever happens in the rest of his career, he will always have the McCartney award.
This is the first Bill on which the Under-Secretary has worked with me, and I hope that it will not be the last. She has the passion of a politician, but also the guile and savvy of a lawyer. With those characteristics, she could end up as leader of the Labour party, but we shall pass over that.
I thank my Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner), and my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon (Angela Smith). I could not have expected more from them. I also thank parliamentary counsel, all the officials, the government and parliamentary relations unit and my Bill team. We have not quite finished our activity, but I hope that their work will be well rewarded.
This is one of our flagship Bills. It is critical to the Government and to our relationship with older people. I look forward to the challenges ahead on the Floor of the House and, more important, to the real work that begins when the Bill leaves the House. That will ensure that the measure is implemented effectively and we get the pension credit to those 5.1 million pensioners in the way that we have described.
I finish by saying that I am sometimes rather dubious about the press and would therefore like to hear the Committee's view on something that was written about me last Tuesday. I always like to hear
the views of my parliamentary colleagues. That edition of The Times says that the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
''can surely never have come across anything quite so alien . . . as Ian McCartney, the Minister of State for Pensions.
Mr. McCartney is a Scottish former seaman and chef, pugnacious, entirely round''
and—I paraphrase—so short that even when he stands at the Dispatch Box he sometimes cannot be seen. The article continues:
''Mr. McCartney has a unique rhetorical style, a Tsunami''—
I thought a tsunami was one of those big, fat guys from Japan.