My Lords, I believe that that was a question, but I am not entirely sure. My noble friend pressed me on two points: first, the MIG take-up campaign; secondly, the implications of the pensions credit which is due to be implemented in 2003. I ask noble Lords to allow me to deal with both matters, although it may take a little while given the length of time taken by my noble friend in putting her questions.

First, I did not say that there had been 82,000 responses but that there had been 82,000 successful claims. There were 840,000 responses, approximately half a million of which were by telephone. Of those, 82,000 claims were successful. Claims were unsuccessful because the individuals had too much income or capital, which are issues that we seek to address in our subsequent developments. As for my noble friend's suggestion that this arises because of stigma, of the 470,000 people who replied to the MIG take-up campaign by telephone, only one-fifth knew that MIG was income support and of those the vast majority said that it did not matter. I do not accept my noble friend's argument that stigma deters people from claiming. People did not know that it was an income support benefit, and for the most part the reason they failed to be eligible was that they had too much income or capital.

Secondly, my noble friend referred to pensioner credit and the extension of means testing to 5½ million people. It is the case that under pension credit 5½ million people will enjoy both MIG and the protection of the modest occupational pensions that so many pensioners have in this country. My noble friend might have rejoiced with me that because MIG is earnings-related 55 per cent of all pensioners will in future effectively have their pensions earnings-related.