My Lords, I should explain to the Committee that a number of amendments that I have tabled to the Bill have been tabled after I have had a fairly lengthy discussion with the pensions officer of the union Unite, of which I am a member. As the Committee will probably know, for many years, I was a national officer of one of the founding unions of Unite, and that is where I come from on pensions. The union has always been very interested in pension provision, and the amendments have been tabled as a result of discussion with large sections of the membership.
This amendment arises because of the exclusion of certain people from the capital altogether. The reform proposed in the Bill has been brought forward at a time when half of all existing pensioners qualify for means-tested benefits and one-third of all pensioners with incomes below the guaranteed credit level for pension credit are not getting the benefits.
I am told that there is huge resentment among today’s pensioners that they are being ignored, and special resentment on the part of those who feel that they might have benefited from the new legislation but have lost out because of the cliff edge presented by the effect of the April 2016 date.
For those reasons, I tabled the amendment that the subsection should be deleted. As I understand it, the policy of the union is that government policy ought to be focused on raising the level of the basic state pension for all pensioners. That is what the union is standing on at the moment. It is for that reason, and to test the feeling of the Government on the issue of the concern of existing pensioners, that I have tabled the amendment. I also fully support Amendment 2, with which it has been grouped, because, again, it is concerned with the poverty of existing pensioners, which is something we should all be concerned about. I beg to move.