Clause 1 - ''Qualifying individual'' and ''relevant week''
Age-Related Payments Bill
9:25 am
Professor Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
Amendment No. 10 is relatively straightforward. It says that entitlement to the payment of £100 should not merely be restricted to those people who have attained the age of 70 by the relevant qualifying week in September, but extended to cover those people who can be expected to reach the age of 70 by the end of 2004-05. We have defined that as individuals who were born on or before 31 March 1935.
In a sense, we are suspending disbelief and are supposing that what the Government say about their purposes in bringing forward the Bill is true. I appreciate that that might not last for the whole day,
but we will humour them for now, take them at their word and assume that the Bill's purpose is to help older pensioners to pay their council tax. We will leave aside the fact that the payment that we are discussing is made irrespective of whether anybody has any council tax to pay. Something of a fiction is involved, but that is the Bill's stated basis and we will go along with it for now.
The question then is whether it is appropriate to say to people who reach the age of 70 in October or November 2004-05, which would be before most of the payments are even made, that they do not qualify. Anybody who reaches the age of 70 by the end of 2004-05 will have been 70 during a year in which they have to pay the inflated levels of council tax that people up and down the land are being asked to pay. If the Government are true to their word and are worried about the impact of the council tax on pensioners, particularly on older pensioners, why would they want to exclude people who are 70 at some point during a year in which they have to pay council tax?
The Minister could say that there are operational reasons for that and that the Government have chosen the dates in September because that coincides with the winter fuel payments. I believe that they think that they need to know in good time who will be applying for such payments so that they can work out how much those people are entitled to. Surely, in the case of the payments that we are discussing, we know at the start of 2004-05 when people were born. We know who is alive and was born on or before 31 March 1935. Therefore, in a way, we are doing the Government a favour. We are not saying that they must wait until September before they can work out to whom they should pay the money; we are telling them now. We will ease their administrative burden and help them to deliver those payments on time. I am sure that they will welcome the amendment.
The other objection that they might have is that some of those people might die before the end of the year. In other words, they might be paying money to widows, estates and so on. Anybody who, under the Government's rules, would have been 70 by the qualifying week would have spent at least six months paying their council tax in any case. Given that such people would have had to contribute to the vastly inflated council tax bills that pensioners must pay, why should they not be entitled to a payment? Paying that money to widows of people who were over 70 seems entirely unobjectionable. Presumably, widows are hit particularly hard by the council tax. If the amendment is accepted, the money will be payable to the estate, the widow or the widower of some people who will be dead before the end of the financial year. That does not seem to be a problem.
I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks it would cost to expand the scheme in that way; I am sure that he has costed it. Given that the whole scheme costs nearly £500 million, extending it for six months and involving people who are between 69 and a half and 70 on the qualifying date would be a relatively marginal change. I am sure that he will enlighten us on that point.
I will comment on amendment No. 1 now so that I do not need to return to it. I am sure that the hon. Member for Eastbourne will make his remarks in due course. I must admit to having been rather startled to see it on the amendment paper. In the normal modest way of the Liberal Democrats, our amendment, if it were to be accepted, would make an incremental spending commitment, whereas the Conservative amendment would make a socking great spending commitment—I hope you will forgive the use of a technical term, Mr. Conway. It says that everybody between 60 and 70 should get the £100. That would doubtless add hundreds of millions of pounds to the cost. I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Eastbourne has cleared it with his revered leader in this area, the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), and whether has the authorisation to splash money around like confetti. That is obviously what he has in mind. Anyone would think that local elections were coming up in his constituency and that he potentially had a high pensioner vote. I do not know whether that is true or not, but it might be.
Given that the business of the £100 being to do with council tax is something of a fiction, the idea that we should extend the principle and that we should do so in the run-up to an election seems strange. I hope that when the hon. Member for Eastbourne speaks to amendment No. 1 he will tell us where he would find the money for the scheme, because I find wild, reckless tax and spend difficult to cope with.