I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for tabling this amendment on an issue which I know is of great concern to her: access to contributory state benefits, including pensions, for those who have more than one job but do not earn above the national insurance low earnings limit in any one of them.
We have debated this issue over the years. She will be aware that I have equal concern about this issue. Before we get into the specifics, we have a policy to seize this issue head-on, and that is through universal credit. When you look at the debate this afternoon when we talked about the present system—JSA, tax credits, the problems of going through—universal credit basically combines in-work JSA where you are credited for your pension, and in-work benefits. Therefore, the low paid will be credited in the same way as people on JSA are currently credited. Our estimate is that 800,000 more people will be credited as a result of the adoption of universal credit. Noble Lords may well say that universal credit is taking its time coming in: one or two noble Lords have made that point to me. I can only say that we are going as fast as possible. We are rolling it out.
That is the fundamental solution. Any of the adjustments suggested today would be time-consuming changes to make. One has to take a strategic decision. Does one have a system that sweeps away these problems, or does one make itsy-bitsy changes with HMRC here or there? They all take time. I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, who said that HMRC is slow to make adjustments, but they are genuinely difficult to do. I have been involved in quite a few government change programmes now and even relatively modest changes are time-consuming and soak up the energy of the people doing them.
The question asked by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, about cutting into the RTI system ahead of universal credit is an interesting one. Clearly, we are looking very closely at how we use RTI in different ways. One of the issues in terms of a comprehensive solution for this relatively small group is that we have to be sure they are on the PAYE system in order to use it as a comprehensive cut through. My instinct—again, data are short here—is that this is not a comprehensive solution in the same way as catching them at the UC level. If you are not on PAYE, you can self-declare and get the system to work. I do not think that RTI is the solution.
As noble Lords have pointed out, the numbers are relatively small—some 50,000—but just because the numbers are small does not mean that we should not worry about the issue. That is what universal credit is trying to catch.