Mr. BECKETT:

I am astonished at the reception that the Amendment has had from the right hon. Gentleman. I thought it was time that he gave another concession on this Bill and that this email matter, in terms of finance, afforded such an opportunity when he might have celebrated his long abstention from concession by giving us something. Instead of that, he has treated us probably to the most ingenious of all the very ingenious arguments which he and the Parliamentary Secretary have competed with each other to give to us on this Bill. He told us that he cannot accept our Amendment, because it is only slightly less wicked than his original proposal. He says that his proposal may be bad, but that our Amendment will not help very much. That is an extraordinary reason for rejecting an Amendment.

There are many cases of people who will be very unfairly treated by the inclusion of this period of a month. If we allow them two months, it would make a considerable amount of difference. A widow may lose her husband suddenly and she may be distraught and, like women often do, she may have depended entirely on her husband to attend to her affairs. A month may pass before she realises that she has a right to make an application for a pension. There is no one in this House who works on a technical plea of this sort to put a woman in a very unhappy condition which might deprive her of her pension for a month or six weeks or two months. There are cases, such as the Mover of the Amendment suggested, where the death is not known in time to make a claim within a month. There are cases of casual workers and men whose occupation takes them from place to place, and abroad. You may have cases of parents dying suddenly and leaving children in a strange town. The relatives or friends will have to fetch the children, and they may not know what the man's employment was, where he was employed, and whether he was an insured man, and before they can pick up the whole chain of circumstances the time may have passed and the children will be penalised. The Minister justifies that by the very extraordinary statement that he wishes to encourage the widow or the orphan to put in their claim promptly.

This provision will be equally hard in regard to old people. There is probably no Member of any party who is not constantly receiving letters from old people in his Constituency saying, "I only found out a little while ago that I am 71. I thought I was 69," and asking what one can do for them. Hon. Members know the extreme difficulty that very often arises in finding out the age of these old people, and establishing their claim to a pension. If an insured man who has contributed all his life gets to 65 and is obscure about his age, and thinks he is 63 and then it takes him a month or more to find out his age, he is to be penalised. The Minister appears to think that we can only point to one or two isolated cases, but, if it were not that one did not wish to keep the Committee at great length, one could go on quoting case after case of people to whom this provision will mean a very hard condition. There are people who have reached an old age and are slow to do things for themselves, there are children who, obviously, cannot look after these things themselves, and there are widows who are affected at a time when they are least capable of dealing with their affairs, and unless within a month of the death of the breadwinner they make their application they are to be penalised. I hope the Minister will see whether he cannot in some way meet this serious objection.