Clause 1
Pensions Bill
11:45 am
James Purnell (Minister of State (Pensions Reform), Department for Work and Pensions; Stalybridge and Hyde, Labour)
The answer to that question is both. Residency is wrong in principle, and the task of going back and working out people’s residency over the past 50 or 60 years would be an administrative nightmare, hugely expensive, and impossible.
The Government’s normal approach to introducing changes such as those proposed is to phase them in. Pretty much every Public Bill Committee, whether happening today or even this Session, will have some kind of debate about the introduction of measures and the way in which people fall on either side of the line. One of the inevitable consequences of making changes to legislation is that some people will benefit and others will not.
The normal practice is to phase measures in. The reason why the Government have decided not to do that now is that we want to benefit as many people as possible as quickly as possible. We wanted to make quick progress on increasing the number of people, particularly women, who get a full state pension. By bringing all the measures in on the same day in 2010, we achieve the significant increase that the hon. Member for Eastbourne generously described as a steep incline, rather than a cliff edge.
We could move the reduction in qualifying years to 30 over a few years, but that would mean that fewer people would benefit overall. It would not give anybody extra benefits unless we introduced it before 2010, as I will discuss later; it would just remove benefits from some people to reduce a perceived discrepancy between them and people falling before the 2010 date. That would not be of great comfort to constituents. We would be saying to people retiring before 2010, “We have made no difference to your outcomes, but we have reduced what other people will get.” I am not sure that that would reconcile them.