Clause 5
Pensions Bill
9:10 am
Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Northampton, North for tabling and moving this amendment. I am equally pleased that she confirmed that it is a probing amendment. She made some interesting points, particularly about the effects of the Bill on women, and I am sure that her comments were right. I do not want to steal the Minister’s thunder, but I suspect that the answer to her fundamental question is that it would cost too much. However, I am particularly keen to hear what he has to say about the cost of going down that road.
May I correct one small thing? The hon. Lady said that the Conservative party does not like pension credit. It is important to put on the record that we would not have introduced it, but have no intention of scrapping it. However, we want fewer pensioners subject to it as time goes on. As she well knows—she follows such things closely—about 1.5 million pensioners do not claim pension credit who are entitled to do so. I hope that that is clear.
There is a real issue here: the state second pension is an important lifeline for many people and can makeall the difference to their standard of living during retirement. There is a double whammy because not only are the Government not proposing to uprate the S2P with earnings, as the hon. Lady’s amendment points out, but they are going to flat-rate it, which will particularly affect medium and higher earnings. We will debate that at greater length later, hence I have kept my remarks rather short. She is approaching that from a different direction, but it is important that we hear from the Minister the Government’s justification for leaving out the additional pension from this important uprating move.