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Benefits Uprating

I welcome the fact that the hon. Gentleman will not be voting against the measures. I was looking at the exchanges from last year, when he was teasing my predecessor about welfare reform. It is interesting to look back. The hon. Gentleman said that the Government were dithering about incapacity benefit reform. We are now legislating on it. He said that the Government would do nothing about the Turner report. We have now brought forward a Bill on it. He said that the Government would do nothing about the Child Support Agency. We have a White Paper due shortly. It is quite clear that, over the last year, there has been real progress on welfare reform. We are legislating to implement the things that he said last year we would do nothing about. I am glad that he recognises that and that the Opposition support us on quite a lot of this. In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s detailed questions, I think that the rate of inflation that he referred to is the pensioner poverty index, which is a technical measure. It is related only to the proportion of pensioners who get most of their income from the state—75 per cent., I think. Of course, the vast majority of them are on pension credit and their pension credit will go up in line with earnings. We are the first Government to do that. They used to have to live on £68.80; it is now going up to nearly £120. We have committed to continue to do that in relation to earnings. In fact, we are going to legislate for that. I am sure that the Conservatives will join us in voting for that to continue to be uprated in line with earnings, because that is the certainty that the poorest pensioners in our country deserve. Of course, there is always more that we can do on pensioner poverty. However, it is worth remembering that when we came to power there were more than 3 million pensioners in poverty. Now there are fewer than 1 million. That has been achieved only because of the policies that we put in place—policies that the Opposition have opposed at every single stage. The hon. Gentleman asked what more we could do to increase take-up. We are doing exactly that. I am happy to provide him with a briefing on the pensions transformation programme, which is one of the leading programmes on that in the world. It is making a significant difference. The National Audit Office, which reported on the Pension Service recently, made it clear that good progress had been made. It made some suggestions—in particular, about how we can reach the poorest pensioners in our society and how we can make sure that pensioners claim all the benefits that they are entitled to—which we will look at. I urge any Member of the House who is worried about this matter to go on a visit to look at how the local service is helping people to claim their benefits, and to see the real progress that is being made and the way that that is transforming the incomes of some of the poorest pensioners in our society. As part of that programme, we are responding to the point that the hon. Gentleman made about council tax benefit. We want more pensioners to be able to claim that and there is a radical new way for them to do so. There is now a three-page form where there used to be a 26-page-form. Claims can be made over the phone in a matter of minutes. We are looking forward to that starting to make a big difference. As I said in my statement, we are already paying out £30 million extra in backdated claims because of the data matching exercise that we did. The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of incapacity benefit reform. As he knows, there is a major Bill going through the House on that. I thought that he was slightly churlish in not acknowledging the fact that there are now 900,000 more disabled people in work than there were before and not acknowledging the great success of pathways to work, which is recognised by independent experts as one of the most successful programmes anywhere in the world for people who are on inactive benefits. The hon. Gentleman finished by talking about fraud and simplification, which is an important subject. Our simplification unit is constantly looking at ways of simplifying benefits. For example, we have just announced a radical simplification of the state second pension system, which will mean that people will know that they will get £1.40 a week extra in retirement for every year that they care or contribute. We are always looking for opportunities to simplify the system, not least because that can help to reduce error and to deal with fraud. It is worth remembering that, before we came to power, the Tories never even measured what fraud was going on in the system. We have reduced fraud in income support and jobseeker’s allowance by two thirds. That is another area where we have made significant progress and one that I hope that the House will welcome.