Oral Answers to Questions

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (David Rutley)]

It is obviously important to ensure that we get our payments right, and we are working hard to do that, but it is also important to balance the needs of the taxpayer with those of benefit recipients. We do need to get that balance right.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

The Department’s annual report, released last week, has revealed that the estimate of the number of women who have been short-changed over their retirement pensions has risen by a further 103,000. That is not quite the rosy impression that the Select Committee was given when the Secretary of State and the permanent secretary appeared before it recently. Just how long will these women have to wait before they receive their legal entitlement, and can the Minister confirm that there will not have to be a further upward revision of these estimates?

[Guy Opperman]

It is unquestionably the case that this Government are trying to resolve matters that date back some 20 years. I might have wished that some of my predecessors who occupied the illustrious position of Pensions Minister, some of whom now sit on the Opposition Benches, had made a better job of monitoring these matters. We are fixing the problem. We have—definitely—more than 500 people working on it now, and, as I explained to the Select Committee, we will have upwards of 1,000, rising to 1,300, working on it on an ongoing basis; so it will be fixed in the very near future.