Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 16th November 2021 Lords Chamber

So some approximations are possible. Why are the Government not willing to accept these numbers? They are there, so any Government with good will and who cared for our senior citizens would have ensured that it was possible to adopt some of these numbers, modify them or even commission research from the Bank of England and the ONS to that effect. However, I sense that the political will to improve the living standards of our senior citizens is not there. That is a fundamental problem.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I will be brief and speak on behalf of my noble friend Lady Janke, our Front-Bench spokesman on this Bill. Unfortunately, she cannot be here today.

First, I will say that we are glad that the Government have reconfirmed their commitment to the triple lock in the long term throughout all these discussions. We are disappointed that the Commons have rejected these amendments. The Government had an excellent opportunity to maintain their manifesto commitment while taking into account the special circumstances of the pandemic. We will not be pursuing this amendment —we accept that this has to be accepted—but we thank the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, for the work that she has done.

We are concerned that pensioners will not be protected from the effects of the economic pressures now coming from inflation. The Governor of the Bank of England is very uneasy about the situation and we want to know whether the Government are prepared to keep an open mind and look particularly at the case of the poorest pensioners as time goes on in the next few months, when these pressures will come to a head. More importantly, we are extremely supportive of the maintenance of the triple lock in the longer term.

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, we have been hearing lately that the House of Lords is a rather useless body and that the other place is better—but twice recently your Lordships’ House has asserted that it cares more for the people than the other place. The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, stood up for the right of the citizen to clean water, asserting that against what the Commons had said. We also stood up for the triple lock and had that rejected.

I have a very simple suggestion for the Government. Since they have no intention of helping pensioners, why can they not be honest and say that the triple lock simply means that we will raise pensions by the lowest number of the three which are here, unless it is higher than the Bank of England target of 2% inflation? The 2% inflation that the Bank of England has chosen as its target is not a statistic. It is not disputable because they have made it up. It will always stay at 2%. So the Government could at least guarantee to be honest; they could just give 2% and run away. They should not give false promises and then not fulfil them.