Pensions Bill

Indeed, and we need to ask GPs if they would be willing to take on that role. The Government should not land things on various professionals without asking their opinion; they need to be engaged in the debate. Everything in the Bill that makes it easier for women to build up their national insurance credits is to be welcomed. As those provisions are implemented, and more and more women begin to qualify, it will make sense to restore the earnings link to the basic state pension. I regret not that we did not restore the link, but that the pensions debate has been sidelined into that narrow category. It made for an easy slogan, but there was not always full understanding of what restoring the link meant. When I spoke to pensioner groups, I discovered that they had different interpretations. Some, like the Government, thought it meant restoring the annual upgrading to match the annual increase in earnings. However, some pensioners thought it meant making sure that the basic state pension was a percentile of the average wage, while others thought it meant they would receive backdated payments amounting to what would have been paid in the annual uprating from the date when the link was broken to the day it was restored. Those who were crying—a very Scottish word that means ““call””—for the restoration of the link may not all have been calling for exactly the same thing. The Government should make it possible for almost everyone to qualify for the basic state pension. The contribution need not be monetary, as it obviously is in the national insurance scheme; it could be social, based on the time people have given in their caring role. The wider the Government can spread the net, to ensure that as many people as possible qualify for national insurance credits, the wider the coverage of the basic state pension and the more sense it will make to restore the link. Before we even consider restoring the link, we have to make sure that it is as easy for women to qualify for the basic state pension as it was, in general, for men; otherwise we shall merely have expanded the inequalities inherent in the existing system. I urge the Government to go slightly further than the Bill proposes—I hope that the Liberal Democrats will be pleased with my suggestion. The hon. Member for Yeovil was correct to say that I would have preferred a universal pension. That would be the ideal, but I accept the reason why the Government have not, in the short term, used residency to determine who should qualify for the basic state pension. There are difficulties in defining who is resident because the data have not been collected. It will take some years to build up the database, so it is more sensible to adopt the proposal in the Bill and reduce to 30 the number of qualifying years for the basic state pension. That will achieve the same outcome, but much more quickly. Perhaps to the disappointment of the hon. Member for Yeovil, the universal pension that I envisage would be at the basic state pension level. We need a means of getting the necessary coverage so that everybody who has lived in the UK for 15 or 20 years will receive the basic state pension. The Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National party propose a citizen’s pension, but it is unaffordable as it is tied into somehow—I am not sure exactly how they are going to do it—eliminating means-testing. I thought that I understood the citizen’s pension until I heard today’s debate. I had thought that it would be set at a sufficiently high level to minimise, though not eliminate, means-testing and that the qualification would be based on residency. If that were the case, those who had previously paid national insurance contributions in the UK, but now lived abroad, would qualify for the citizen’s pension. However, the hon. Member for Yeovil said that they would not, so I do not know whether the citizen’s pension is based on residence or contributions or what. It cannot be both, so we need to be much clearer about what it would be based on.