Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Commons, 2020-10-01
Topic: Social Welfare
Jonathan Neil Reynolds (Labour, Centre-left): With the leave of the House, I will briefly respond to the debate on behalf of the Opposition. It is not often that we have more speakers than clauses in the legislation before us, but I very much appreciate Members’ contributions. The hon. Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts) was right to highlight the impact of the pandemic on older people. I do not like the intergenerational aspect that is sometimes put on this crisis. It has affected all groups in society in different ways, and in particular, we all feel strongly about the burden in relation to care homes. Indeed, many of us would quite like to see parents and grandparents when the opportunity hopefully arises again The hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) made many good points. I agree with him on the take-up of pension credit and the issues around that. Longer term, my preference would be that the new state pension apparatus that was set up in the last Parliament becomes such a satisfactory minimum that pension credit becomes a residual benefit and we do not have the issues that we do around pensioner poverty I also very much recognise and agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments on legacy benefits. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), the Chair of the Select Committee, said, the issue was always given as the time it would take to do the uprating. We are now well into the pandemic and beyond the point where that could have come online had the Government chosen to act The wider comments from my right hon. Friend were very welcome. He spoke about pension credit, and it is important to say that it was a conscious choice of the Government post-1997 to address the huge issue of pensioner poverty that had built up; that is what the majority of resources at that point went into. There should not be an automatic linkage between retirement and poverty, as was the case at the end of the 1990s. As ever, I very much welcome all the work the Select Committee has done into the impact of the current crisis on the social security system, and the wider points that have been made The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) strongly supported the triple lock, which I agree with. She made a crucial point on intergenerational fairness, and it was one I was going to make at Committee stage, but I will make it now. Often, in the media commentary around this issue, the intergenerational point is made without reference to the fact that we are not just talking about the level of increase for pensioners today, although someone who has just entered retirement will hopefully, in a very good way, now experience that uprating for several years. We are really talking about what the level of the state pension will be by the time today’s workers retire. That was very much the modelling behind the changes that were made to the single-tier basic state pension. The increase in the retirement age made the overall package of spending on the state pension a reduction overall in order to make it, in the words of the coalition Government at the time, more sustainable. That is an important point to remember when we are talking about cost and the impact on different generations of the changes we are talking about today Overall, however, there is rightly a clear consensus in the Chamber for Second Reading to proceed, and I very much welcome the contributions that have been made.