Pensions Bill

Debate between Steve Webb and Peter Bottomley

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

Indeed. The hon. Lady is right. Some women are in that position, but a significant proportion of them have had very limited contact with this country. This is the point that she touched on. Derived rights arise to people who have never even been to the country. They can get a 60% pension or a widow’s pension because their spouse is part of the UK pension system. She is asking us to keep, for another 15 years, an extraordinarily complex bit of the system rolling into the new system. We are trying to deliver a simple and effective new state pension system and we have already introduced transitional protection for the most obvious group, the married woman’s stamp pensioners, which we think needs to be protected. We could have kept the whole of the old system rolling on for another 15 years, but that would have created enormous complexity when we are trying to move to a simpler system.

Were we to follow new clause 5 and the Select Committee’s recommendation and choose 15 years as the cut-off, we could be as sure as anything that we would be under judicial review for someone who was 16 years shy of the line. In other words, if we have a cut-off date, we must have an objective basis for it, and we can find no objective basis for choosing 15 years. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South that because 10 years is the de minimis, 15 years is a bit more than 10. I get that, but so is 16 or 14.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh East said that someone some years ago was told not to buy missing years and now it is too late. I stress that the ability to buy missing years has been substantially relaxed by HMRC so people can buy back as far as 2005-06 on relatively favourable terms. Even by the end of the decade they will still be in a position to buy back missing years. If they have spent the money and they do not have it any more, they cannot do it, but that aside, the ability to buy back missing years still exists. Although buying 10 years costs a lot of money, very few people will be starting from zero. So to reach the 10-year de minimis would not necessarily involve a huge outlay. Many will be over that level already and for those who are not and who have been in this country, the chance to buy one or two missing years will be important.

What we are trying to do is, yes, recognise where we need transitional protection, but we want to avoid such great complexity that we recreate the complex old system for well over a decade in the new one. That is why we reject new clause 5.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Did not the Minister’s last point—that we do not want to continue the kind of discrimination that we had in the past—answer why he should accept amendment 1 and drop clause 20?

[Steve Webb]

My hon. Friend, as ever, is sharp on these matters. Amendment 1, which stands in his name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), would delete clause 20. As the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out, that would do nothing for any of the overseas pensioners who have contacted us as their MPs; it would only remove the freezing for single-tier pensioners. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) understands that point, but I just want to be clear that if we voted for the amendment, all we would be doing is creating a new anomaly.

In a sense, the Chair of the Select Committee urged us to create that new anomaly. She said that we cannot defend the old one and that we should at least not carry on with it, but by doing that we would create a new anomaly. It is not just about which side of the Niagara falls one happens to live on, because single-tier pensioners would get indexation but nobody else would. I think that we all know what would happen: we would end up back in court. My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West referred, quite properly, to the extensive legal background to the issue, because it has been tried and tested by the International Consortium of British Pensioners in a range of courts, and all have found that in many cases what the Government are doing is implementing the law of the land as it has stood for decades.

My hon. Friends the Members for Worthing West and for North Thanet went to see the Prime Minister, and I am grateful to them for doing so. My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West referred to the reply he received today from the Prime Minister—I am pleased that he replied in advance of the debate—who stated that, having reflected on their arguments, he did not feel that a further review was appropriate at this point. Obviously, the context he referred to is the £700 million cost of indexing those pensions. My hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet said that they were not asking for that to be backdated, but I speculate that as soon as we start indexing pensions and stepping them back up to where they would have been, the next court case will come when someone says, “Hang on a minute. Since you froze my pension I have missed out on X amount of money, so I expect that to be paid back as well.” These wedges have a knack of having thin ends. The cost of addressing this, at £700 million a year, is already substantial, but backdating would lead to far more substantial costs, which is difficult to justify at present.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Webb]

In addition to the issue of people who will subsequently be bereaved is that of people who will flow on to savings credit, and nobody can possibly know whether, at some point during the course of their retirement, they will move on to that. Although I understand the concerns that have been raised, that group of women have actually benefited from the triple lock that we have introduced. Far from doing them down, as the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Gregg McClymont) has suggested, we have improved their pension position. On his more general point about the position of women in the pension system, this whole Bill is about improving that position. That is why I urge the House to reject the amendments and to support the Bill.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Am I right in saying that, under the procedure of the House, amendment 1, which would remove clause 20, will not be called because of the guillotine?