My Lords, I am sorry but I really disagree with the Minister on this. My noble friend Lord Browne showed rather movingly how losing the 60% dependency pension along with a failure to claim credits and the limitations on buyback that will continue to happen interlock to ensure that a woman who has done “the right thing” by her family at every point that she has been asked to make a decision, putting her family interest ahead of her own, will end up with an inadequate, incomplete and pretty minimal basic state pension. That was why we fought quite hard in those years to enable people to buy back missing years. I can see no moral difference between a rich kid living in Antibes having the money paid for them by their father as they sail around the place and a woman who failed to complete a year’s contributions because she accompanied her husband when he moved jobs or because she was caring for somebody and was not eligible for carer’s credit and is not allowed to buy back. The time limit of six years or so is entirely arbitrary to suit the convenience of the DWP and to try to impose this measure on people’s very different and complicated lives.
I still think that our position was right and that the position taken by the department and the Minister is wrong. By 2030 or so this will not be an issue, but a lot of people are going to retire in 2016 and their missing years will not be from 2006 to 2016 but from 1995 or 2000. The Minister is now telling us that those people cannot buy back the missing years, even at an appropriate price, although it will be no problem for somebody 10 years down the road to buy back years from 15 years beforehand. That inconsistency, as well as a failure to recognise the problems that many women have had in the past—which have bedevilled pension issues—in building up a coherent NI record, will remain with us if the Minister is not able to move on this front.