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Pensions Bill

The hon. Lady cleverly makes her point about the pension compensation. I cannot speculate on the reasons for the Minister not reading his own reports, but when he looks at them in detail and at the regulatory impact assessment for the Bill he will see, in black and white—we are grateful for the statistics being so clear—that between now and 2020, the share of GDP spent on state pensions will fall from 6.2 to 6.1 per cent. So the reform is not in any sense an unaffordable solution. Indeed, it is an incredibly cheap solution, which is why there are the problems with means-testing. I do not believe the reform will falter on philosophical grounds, either. There seems to be a relatively strong agreement, at least between the Front-Bench teams of the three political parties, and I think on the part of the nationalist parties as well, that the state’s responsibility is to focus on the first-tier pension and try to take people out of poverty. The Government rely to some extent on means-testing to do that poverty prevention work. There is an assumption that the second pension will be independent of the Government, will not depend on their good will in future to continue, and will involve private accounts which individuals own. That is a different approach for the Labour party, by comparison with both the state second pension and the state earnings-related pension scheme, but it is more likely to endure.