Pensions Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, made a brief but powerful attack on the evils of means-testing and I do not propose to duplicate his figures. However, given the scandal of 1.7 million or 1.8 million people—whatever the figure is—not receiving the pension credit to which they are entitled, the disincentive effect of means-testing and the problem for people under the national pensions savings scheme, I was a little surprised that he did not seem to feel that we should take stronger and bolder action to reduce means-testing. Be that as it may, we all agree that there is a problem. We on these Benches still have an open mind on the amendment. As the noble Lord said, the department already provides most of this information. I am not against the Secretary of State’s making a regular report but I am not sure whether it is more appropriate to ask the Secretary of State to do another report or to ask a more independent body to do it. Perhaps we can return to that when we come to the provisions on the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority and our Amendment No. 111. We are thinking of having the authority do it so that it can specifically look at and link in the effect of means-testing, estimates of the amount of means-testing, and the effect that that has on whether people should be saving through auto-enrolment and so forth. The noble Lord’s amendment and our later amendment both call for a number of other reports. We will have to wait and see how the discussion on other report-seeking amendments goes, because we do not want to create a report overload. However, I accept the broad thrust of this amendment. We will need further discussions before Report to see how hard we should press each of these report-seeking amendments.