Clause 7 - Power to provide for payments
Age-Related Payments Bill
11:00 am
Mr Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Economic Affairs; Eastbourne, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 7, in
clause 7, page 4, line 15, leave out 'may' and insert 'shall'.
Even compared with what has gone before, this part is really interesting because it seems to have landed in the middle of the Bill from some other dimension or planet. It flies in the face of the rest of the Bill and what Ministers—in particular this Minister—have been saying.
On 30 April 2004, the Minister, in a written answer to the hon. Member for Northavon, talked about
''ad-hoc payments to pensioners''—[Official Report, 30 April 2004; Vol. 420, c. 1369W.]
In a reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) on 4 May 2004, the Minister made it abundantly clear that this is a one-off payment to people over 70 resulting from the Budget statement. One would have thought that that was where the matter would rest. It was a one-off payment motivated by worries about the council tax.
We are told that the Government are in the process of coming up with some proposals for the reform of Government finance, which are promised in July. The Minister may or may not be privy to the options that
are being considered. It would be fascinating to hear, as far as it is in order to do so, how that debate is developing in the Government. People might think that that would be the end of the matter.
We also heard an argument about the 70-years cut-off point. The Minister argued why that would cost too much and be inappropriate. It seems that all the help is being directed at older pensioners because they deserve it more and are likely to have less money. Then, barrelling out of nowhere, comes clause 7(1), which contains two things that are at odds with what has been said.
The Government intend to make regulations. I wonder, just for a laugh, whether there is any chance of the Committee seeing draft regulations, but I will not hold my breath. The Government say that they will make regulations to provide for further one-off payments in the future, if that does not sound too Irish, and—blow me!—those will apply to people who have reached the age of 60, not 70. I do not know what the Minister is getting at.
Amendment No. 7 is the mother of all probing amendments, as it changes the word ''may'' to ''shall,'' which is simply designed to tease out what is going on. Are we talking about an annual event? Recent political history suggests that when we start giving pensioners Christmas bonuses or payments to cover cold weather or winter fuel, they become, as with the free television licences for certain pensioners, fixtures—[Interruption.] I hear a murmur of assent from the Labour Back Benchers. There will come a point when the Government will have difficulty saying, ''We gave it to you one year, but we'll not give it to you in another.''
The only way out for the Government would be for them to come up with some impressive proposals to amend the system of local government finance. We should not get into the detail of that. We know that the Liberals want to get rid of council tax and replace it with something called local income tax, which would be wholly unworkable, with a lot of pensioners ending up paying more than they do now.
The £100 figure is popular in this context. We all remember the promises made at the Brent, East by-election when we saw pictures of the Liberal Democrats giving a £100 cheque to pensioners. Just for the record, that policy has been abandoned. The following article, referring to the Liberal Democrat leader, appeared in The Guardian:
''The Lib Dem insisted that he had not broken his promise, although he admitted that the pledge would not now be met. 'It is not a matter of breaking a promise. It is a matter of saying that we have been reviewing policies'.''
We all know about the kind of policy that pops up in time for a high-profile by-election and dies afterwards, although, as we discovered in a debate the other day, the promise still features on the website of the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather).