Clause 1. — (Extension of right to widows' pensions.)

Part of Orders of the Day — Widows', Orphans' and Old Age Contributory Pensions Bill. – in the House of Commons at on 11 November 1929.

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Photo of Miss Eleanor Rathbone Miss Eleanor Rathbone , Combined English Universities

I agree with nine-tenths of what the right hon. Gentleman the Minister in charge of the Bill has said against this Amendment, but still I do not think that he has quite met the case for the Amendment. In what he said as regards the enormous expense and the futility of means tests in general I completely agree. Many hon. Members in the Second Reading Debate on this Bill pointed out that means tests were extraordinarily unpopular. From considerable experience in trying to apply these tests I know that they are not only extraordinarily unpopular but are desperately demoralising. When you ask a poor woman to whom a few shillings per week means the difference between comfort and comparative privation to answer a lot of questions as to her means, you are offering her a very high inducement to misstate the truth; and unless you are prepared to go into very wide inquiries as to whether applicants have told the truth or not, which would be come extremely expensive, you would only be demoralising people by offering to them a regular bribe to misstate their circumstances. If we are merely going to save giving a pension to a small handful of women, as the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Health has said—a mere decimal point of one per cent.—by taking measures to keep out the rich widow, I say that it is not worth while, but is far more expensive than it is worth.

It appears to me that the whole question whether the word "necessitous" can rightly foe admitted depends upon the point raised by an hon. Member opposite: could or could not the Income Tax limit be applied? Because if it could I suggest that there at once you have a means test which is quite un-objectionable, or as unobjectionable as a means test can ever be. In the first place it is reasonably high; a person who is above the Income Tax limit cannot be said to be in need of a pension anything like so much as thousands and thousands of people who are not being dealt with under this Bill; but a second and more important reason that not only is it reasonably high, but it is automatic. I hope the Government will bear this point in mind when they come to consider an other Bill on their programme as to which they have been considering whether they will impose a means test or not; I mean as to the maintenance allowance in connection with raising the school age. If you ever have to impose means tests at all as a qualification for Government benefit there is only one thing to do, and that is to select a test which is so simple that it can be applied almost automatically.

I noticed that the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Health did not seem quite certain in his mind on this question, but the point is that if you adopt as the means test the question of whether the widow is or is not liable to Income Tax, then all you have to do is in the first place to make her sign a declaration answering the question: Is she or is she not liable to Income Tax? The woman who signs that declaration knows perfectly well that if she tells a falsehood it is perfectly simple for the Department to look up the Income Tax returns; and if you do that in even a proportion of the cases the tendency towards mis-statement would be arrested and there would be very few mis-statements. Therefore, I would ask the Minister whether he could not accept the admission of the word "necessitous," provided he insisted on a further Amendment making it clear that the definition of "necessitous" was to be whether a widow was or was not liable to Income Tax. If he is satisfied that that is a test that he can apply simply by getting a woman to sign a declaration and proving it by reference to the Income Tax returns, the whole problem of the difficulty and expense of applying it is swept away.

There is the argument that the saving would not be very great, and I admit that if you took so high a limit, it would not be very great, but provided you could get it with comparatively little waste of time and money, I think it would be worth while. There is undoubtedly going to be a great many bitter hearts caused by this Bill. There are spinsters who are equally necessitous, and there are the sickly widows, women suffering from ill-health, who are under the age of 55, and these are excluded from the Bill and will feel bitter about it. That may or may not be inevitable or possible to deal with in subsequent Amendments, but at any rate let the Government get rid of what would be a rather notorious hard case, and that is the case of the widows enjoying an income of, say, £250 a year. Although there may be only a handful of them, they could be pointed to as a notorious example of the unjust way in which the Measure worked.