Oral Answers to Questions

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

16. What steps his Department is taking to support pensioners with increases in the cost of living.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

17. What recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of support for pensioners with increases in the cost of living.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Paul Maynard)]

The Government have provided total support of over £108 billion to help households and individuals with higher bills. As I just said, in addition, the basic state pension has gone up by 8.5% this year.

[Paul Maynard]

The hon. Gentleman has heard the Secretary of State reply at great length to a number of questions on that subject today. As he said, we are looking carefully at the report and considering what is a very complex set of recommendations and proposals to make sure that we do the right thing.

[Deidre Brock]

Ministers certainly seem to prefer the comfort of their own massaged figures to facts. The Trussell Trust, however, says it has seen a 36% rise in pensioners turning to food banks in the past six months, and that is likely to increase. The hard fact is that the UK devotes a smaller percentage of GDP to state pensions and pensioner benefits than most other advanced economies. When will they take pensioner poverty seriously and fix this scandal?

[Paul Maynard]

The households below average income statistics, which are cleared by the Office for National Statistics, show that 1% of low-income pensioners live in a household that has accessed a food bank within 12 months. Given all the effort we are putting into the ongoing campaign to increase access to pension credit and the success that campaign is having, I am very confident that we will make continued progress in reducing pensioner poverty.