Jason McCartney
Main Page: Jason McCartney (Conservative - Colne Valley)Department Debates - View all Jason McCartney's debates with the HM Treasury
(11 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Osborne
We will have plenty of time to debate the recommendations of the parliamentary commission, which I think has done an absolutely excellent job for the House, by the way. We will shortly have the Report stage of the Banking Bill, at which the Government will say how we intend to respond to those recommendations. If there is more work to be done on the drafting of specific amendments, those amendments can be tabled in the House of Lords and they will of course come back to the House of Commons as well. The whole purpose of the parliamentary commission was to enable us to get on with this. If we had created a public inquiry, as Labour recommended, it would only just be getting going now. Instead, Parliament has done what it is supposed to do, which is to investigate a problem and provide recommendations, and we are going to debate those recommendations here.
Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)
2. What assessment he has made of the effect of the pensions triple lock on pensioners.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Danny Alexander)
The triple lock means that the level of the full basic state pension is now £6.85 a week higher than it would have been if it had been uprated only by earnings since 2011-12. That equates to about £356 a year. The average person reaching state pension age in 2013 with a full basic state pension can expect to receive an additional £12,000 in basic state pension over their retirement, thanks to the triple lock.
Jason McCartney
Can my right hon. Friend confirm that the triple lock will prevent a repeat of the disgraceful situation in which pensioners received a pension increase of only 75p?
Danny Alexander
I certainly can confirm that. Putting in a floor of a 2.5% increase in the basic state pension will prevent that disgraceful situation, and I can tell my hon. Friend that, thanks to the triple lock, the basic state pension now represents a higher share of average earnings than at any time since 1992.