Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Nigel Mills Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 20th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. May I start by paying a tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who is in his place, and my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) who left the Department in the reshuffle last week? We may have had our robust scrutiny sessions, but all of us would recognise that both Ministers were fully on top of their brief, keen on the issues and very competent. We wish them both luck in the important jobs that they will have in future, and we welcome the two new Ministers, including my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley). I have enjoyed him being my Whip even more than he enjoyed being my Whip. [Interruption.] To be fair, I think I was the first person to make their Whip vote against the Government during the covid proxy period, so perhaps he really will be glad to have a different job, rather than having to go through that again. None the less, I wish both Ministers all the best in their new roles and look forward to seeing them soon.

I rise to support this Bill. I have been calling on the Government for about a year to fix what will obviously be a problem with the earnings blip due to the reductions at the start of the pandemic and then the hopeful rebound this year. I think it is right that the Government have taken this step and to do it with more than six months’ notice, so that pensioners will not be expecting an 8% rise and then have their hopes dashed in March. Those pensioners now have plenty of warning that that huge rise will not be happening. I think that most people are clear about this given what we have seen over the pandemic, with people losing their jobs, being put on furlough, and losing their earnings. All that insecurity has hopefully passed, but with furlough ending in a few weeks’ time, we may have a further round of that. The idea that a promise that was put in place to ensure the state pension kept pace with earnings would deliver an 8% rise in the state pension, on top of a 2.5% rise the previous year, is not remotely in the spirit of what this promise was meant to be. Most Members who, like me, strongly believe in the triple lock and want it to last a very long time, recognise that it needs to sustainable and reasonable. Had the Government tried to plough ahead and retain the 8% rise, that would have been the biggest threat to the triple lock in the future. It would mean that the Treasury, with its eagle eye, would think that this was a promise that could not be sustained for the long term. I hope we are now clear that this is a one-year suspension and that the triple lock will then be retained in its current form in the long term. That is the right policy and it is what we promised in our manifesto.

I was slightly confused by the Opposition’s approach. They appeared to say that the Government are not being transparent and are breaking a promise, but then accepted that 8% is too high. They therefore seem to be suggesting that the Government should go away and try to find a new definition of earnings that is different from the one that has been used for the 10 years of the triple lock, and that they should come up with a number that is a bit lower than 8% and a bit higher than the 3% or so that inflation would probably give to pensioners. The Opposition seem to think that it would somehow be fairer, more transparent and more honest to say to pensioners, “We aren’t breaking a promise; we’ve just contrived a new definition that gives us the answer that we think is acceptable.” That is clearly nonsensical.

Either we say that we will stick with the 8% that the law puts in place, or we do what the Government are doing here and say, “Look, we can’t stick to that measure. Let’s do something reasonable and have inflation or 2.5%, whichever is higher this year.” That is a clear policy. It is a calculation that we can all see and scrutinise, rather than asking the Government to contrive something that would necessarily be rather odd and artificial, and through which I suspect we would end up in a whole load of court cases while the Government tried to defend why they had picked one arbitrary earnings measure rather than another just to produce a number they were happy with in the first place. I do not see how we could produce a robust process in that situation.

I would have had some sympathy with the amendment of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), had it been selected, because I believe that the Government should retain the universal credit increase, at least for the next six months until we can be sure that the pandemic is finished. That amendment was not selected, so I cannot face the quandary of voting for it. I will happily support the Government tonight in a sensible measure that saves the public finances an unsustainable increase in the state pension that was never in keeping with the spirit of the promise and which in the long term will preserve the triple lock as the right way of protecting state pensions.