Social Security

May I point out that I am the first Opposition Back Bencher to be able to speak in this debate? Only one other Labour Back Bencher has spoken, and nearly all the time has gone, if we want to hear the Minister wind up, which I am sure we all do. I shall therefore be very brief. The issue of the guaranteed minimum pensions and their uprating has hardly been mentioned. A great opportunity has been lost in recent pensions legislation to get rid of guaranteed minimum pensions altogether. They could have been taken out of the system if some creative thinking had been applied. As it is, they cost a lot of money in administration for those few employers who still have defined-benefit schemes and add an enormous amount to the cost. The failure to uprate them fully in line with RPI—the capping procedure—means that a further burden rests on the employers, and that is not what was originally intended. A thorough review of the way in which GMP works is long overdue. There are other problems relating to the administration. For example, many schemes have found that the information coming from HM Revenue and Customs and the National Insurance Contributions Office has been either misleading or incorrect. That again causes problems for the employers who are running the schemes. It is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed. At the moment we have a surplus of indices, which appears almost designed to confuse the general public who are entitled to benefits. We have RPI, the RPI minus X, the consumer prices index and the Rossi index, which is lower than all the others. Most people cannot understand them. Why is it that those who seek income-related benefits, such as jobseeker's allowance, housing benefit and income support, should be discriminated against by the use of the Rossi index, which is lower than all the other indices? Does the Minister think that jobseekers do not have to pay rent, mortgage interest or council tax? Why are those items omitted from the index, when those people often have to pay them?