Pensions Bill

Both situations arise, and, in both cases, people are falling out of the system and being disenfranchised. Some people are not getting the opportunities of others who work exactly the same number of hours for exactly the same pay, but do so for one employer—that is the problem. People working for one employer will qualify because they pay national insurance, but those about whom I am talking will not, although, interestingly, they may pay tax cumulatively. However, they may not pay national insurance in such a way, which is unfortunate because it means that they do not get their entitlement. I ask the Government to consider whether it would be possible to deem the national insurance of such people to have been paid. We have changed other aspects of the system to allow such credits to be made. Such a process would impose an extra burden on the Exchequer because we, the Government, would be making a payment on behalf of those people’s employers. However, if we did not do so, there would be a difficulty when a person had several employers because one would have to pay the employer’s part of the national insurance contribution. That could give rise to negotiations among employers that would not go very well at all, so I can appreciate that that process could be difficult. That is why I propose the simple solution of deeming a credit for those people. At the end of someone’s working life, it might be that such credits would not be necessary because they had qualified in any event under the 30-year rule. However, would it not be sad if part of a person’s working life, in which they had spent five or six years working in the way that I outlined to fit around their children, did not go towards allowing them to meet the 30-year rule and thus to qualify for a full state pension? If we introduced my proposal into the Bill, we could enhance it further. As I am a Back Bencher, I have not fully costed my proposal. I accept that that might present a problem for the Government and that the Bill must hang together as a whole. However, the Secretary of State has worked with me quite closely in the past, for which I thank him. Before I stretch his patience yet further with my attempts to get such a measure into the Bill, I make the plea that he work with me throughout the passage of the Bill so that, by the end of the process, it can hopefully be improved yet more.