Clause 1
Pensions Bill
4:00 pm
David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Taylor. We made good progress under your fellow Chair this morning, and I hope that we will continue to do so this afternoon. I am grateful to the Minister for his response to the cluster of new clauses, especially new clause 23. I am sure that my memory will let me down although it seems a long time ago, but I think that the Minister undertook this morning to publish in the summer of 2007 the research that the Government describe in their response to the Select Committee’s report. I assume that that means before the House rises for the summer recess, although we can never be too sure about such definitions. I therefore hope that the information will be made available to us before we discuss the personal accounts Bill in the latter quarter of this year. Obviously, that information will be extremely useful. It will inform some of the other debates that we shall have later, including those under clause 3 so I shall not raise them now.
I raised earlier with the Minister the ability of the Department to give estimates after the reforms in 2010 of the proportion of male and female pensioners—the stock of pensioners—who will receive a full basic state pension. Although I might have missed it, I do not believe that he was able to respond to that point in the debate, which is understandable given the information that he needed at his fingertips. If he does not have the information now, would he at some stage put it on the public record? With those provisos, we do not intend to press our new clause to a Division.