My Lords, the power provides the flexibility to respond quickly should the need arise to amend the scheme—for example, if there is a group of people to whom it would be inappropriate to offer the opportunity to improve their pension once it was been claimed. Under the current scheme, if the individual is not ordinarily resident in Great Britain or another EEA member state and has claimed their pension, they will not normally be able to suspend it in order to build up an increase. The inclusion of this power means that we can use secondary legislation to mirror the current position for the suspension of a single-tier pension. The amendment would mean that any modification of the option to elect to suspend a single-tier pension would require a degree of parliamentary scrutiny via the primary procedure that would be disproportionate to that change.
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