I hope that the Minister is right but I do not believe that he is. It is very unlikely that the UC system will be sufficiently stable to be rolled out to the entire working-age population—the Government are not catching these people in their labour statistics—before about 2019 or 2020. I would like to be proved wrong but I very much doubt that I will be. Even somebody who has had two children, which means that they will have had 14 years-worth of credit under the new rules, would still be stuck at about 43 or 44 with no ability to add to those years if they came within this category of having no single job that took them above the LEL. Therefore, we wipe out people who are something like 20 years off their pension life, and they will go into retirement with a fairly trivial amount barely over the minimum qualifying amount. I do not think that the Minister can rely on that.
He is right that some women will manage. Particularly if they have children, they will be fine, but if they have no children, they may have a husband. They may both be on perfectly modest incomes but when, taken as a household, they are tested for their eligibility for working tax credits, where the threshold is relatively low, she will not qualify through that either under the joint claim.
Therefore, I am not at all confident but I would be delighted to receive the statistics from the Minister about the coverage, under the circumstances identified in today’s discussion, for those whom UC is intended to help.
The Minister wants a clean and elegant solution. The clean and elegant solution would be to get as many people as possible into the new system and not to rely on pension credit, a legacy system which will otherwise continue for 30 or 40 years. Unless we can get this group into the system as early as possible, he will not find clean and elegant solutions to sustain the Bill. I am glad that he is going to work on it. I hope that, certainly before Report, he can come back and give us an idea of how he is going to address this issue, even if it is about extending conditionality as a credit into JSA conditionality. That would work for me. I want some way of bringing these people in. I promise the Minister that, if he does not address it, this problem will not disappear; it will grow. It is his responsibility to bridge the deficit between where people are and where some of them may be when he has introduced UC three, four, five or six years down the road. Under the circumstances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.