Clause 5
Pensions Bill
1:30 pm
Nigel Waterson (Shadow Minister, Work & Pensions; Eastbourne, Conservative)
Not necessarily. However, I want to deal with costs and pick up some of the hon. Gentleman’s helpful points. I hope that he will not take it personally when I say that I was not entirely convinced by his attempt to chip away at the cost of the measure. However, we are in the hands of the Minister and his officials on the matter of the true cost. I have some comments to make, so perhaps the hon. Gentleman will bear with me. If he feels like intervening, that would also be helpful.
The Minister answered one of my questions in December, saying that the
“cost of uprating the state pension...is approximately £400 million of which...£320 million represents the cost of uprating the basic state pension.”—[Official Report, 14 December 2006; Vol. 454,c. 1341W.]
I am not clear what the other £80 million represents, but perhaps he will tell me later. To return to an intervention that I made on the hon. Member for Yeovil, I am interested to know whether any amounts could be netted off against that. Is it a gross or net figure? I asked the Minister another question in December, about
“how many...Canadian and...Australian pensioners residing in the UK are in receipt of...pension credit and...other means-tested benefits; and what the total annual cost is.”
He said:
“The information is not available as nationality data is not collected by the Department’s administration systems.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2007; Vol. 455, c. 194W.]
That is bad news, I suspect, for the policy for a universal citizen’s pension—but we do not want to go there at the moment.
That raises an interesting question, because there is an assumption about which I think there was an exchange between the hon. Members for Yeovil and for Northampton, North earlier in the debate. The assumption is that we are talking about relatively well-to-do people, who have even been suggested to be more likely to vote Conservative. However, I remember Norman Tebbit once saying to me that he would like to impose a tax on people with gravel drives, Volvos and ponies. When I asked why, he said that those were the kind of people who often voted Liberal Democrat.