Clause 3 - Entitlement: special cases
Age-Related Payments Bill
10:00 am
Mr Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Economic Affairs; Eastbourne, Conservative)
I did not mean to wave the hon. Gentleman back to his seat, but I think that he had finished, or puffed out, as it were. I endorse his points: there is a real perversity here. Leaving aside the care home issue—we all know the problems with take-up—the fact that a pensioner was on full council tax benefit would make no difference; in theory, he would still get the £100. There is clearly a view that we are not going to pay any attention to the benefit system, even that part that is most closely related to the problem that the Government seek to address, albeit from the wrong direction, in our view, which is council tax rises. We are saying that people can get full council tax benefit and still get the £100, yet there is a bizarre distinction for people in care homes.
It is almost as if Ministers start off by saying, ''This is what we want to do. It is all very simple. We are going to give £100 to every pensioner over 70 and hope that we will avoid Armageddon on 10 June,'' but then the officials and draftsmen get to work. They start bringing in complexities that Ministers thought they could avoid by simply saying, ''We are going to give all of them £100.'' I have some sympathy with that problem because I suspect it happens in government regardless of which party is in power.
There appears to be a bizarre distinction. Let us take as an example the reasonably well 71-year-old guy living in his own home who gets full council tax benefit. He has gone to the trouble of filling out the forms and so forth. He gets the whole £100, yet some people in care homes will not get anything. Where is the logic in that?