---

Social Security

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I do not wish to be churlish; the Government put the website together and it is something that has not been done before. I hope that they will reflect on what he said and write to me, or to him, to give some indication of how wider access for those with learning and other disabilities can be delivered in the calculation of one’s personal inflation rate. As usual, he makes a trenchant point, to which I hope Ministers will respond with the good grace for which they are universally popular. Back to the calculator. It presumes to come up with an individualised RPI, but of course an individual punching in the data today would be inputting especially high figures for utilities. According to Ofgem—the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets—gas bills have risen by 71 per cent. and electricity bills by 45 per cent. since 2003. Ministers may want to quibble about what Ofgem is saying. I am not too worried about that, but the major thrust of its argument and, indeed, my argument is that those are astronomically high increases in utility bills far exceeding the level of RPI or the Rossi index in this order. According to the Department for Communities and Local Government, the average council tax bill is about one third higher than it was in 2003, while average water and sewerage rates have increased by just over one quarter. The average man or woman in the street will have been hit by those increases. Let us assume for a moment that they do not have to access many or, indeed, any of the benefits that are subject to this measure. They could equally say, when they are calculating their own level of inflation, that they have seen tiny RPI increases in things that they buy a lot of. For instance, I think that the average figure for a year in relation to inflation for compact discs would be about 0.8 per cent.—less than 1 per cent. We are talking about a 10 per cent. reduction in real terms in the cost of audio-visual equipment. That is good news. There are examples of deflationary pressures. There are falls in the prices of goods such as clothing. Any of us who potter down our local high street see that there are not inflation increases higher than Rossi or RPI in respect of those goods. We understand that, but we also know about the representative basket as regards inflation for all goods. Taken together, those inflationary and deflationary forces have led to an average RPI of 3.6 per cent, but not for pensioners. It is fair to say that if all that pensioners spent their money on was CDs and audio-visual equipment, all would be well, but they do not. A large proportion of their monthly income goes on utility bills and council tax, so for pensioners the reality of inflation is very different from Rossi or RPI, which is the subject of this order. Shona Dobbie of the Alliance Trust summed the situation up when she said:"““The impact of price increases on basic goods and services falls most heavily on the elderly, who spend a higher proportion of their monthly budget on necessities.””" There is no exact science to this, as Ministers well know and as I well know, but there are some decent estimates of the personal inflation levels faced by pensioners in our community today. Last December, Capital Economics did a short study of how inflation affects different groups in society and it concluded that some pensioners face a personal consumer prices index inflation rate of more than 9 per cent.—9.1 per cent., to be exact. Similarly, using the Department for Work and Pensions family expenditure survey, the Alliance Trust has sliced and diced some numbers and examined pensioner expenditure on 85 different items to construct a CPI inflation rate of more than 4 per cent. for the over-75s. There are two points to be made in taking those studies on board. First, both the organisations to which I referred based their workings on a CPI method, rather than RPI. The CPI of course excludes housing costs, council tax and mortgage payments, but in so doing it tends to underestimate the cost of living for pensioners by about 1 per cent., according to the ONS. The second point about those estimates of the level of inflation a pensioner household will experience in the real world is that, although we are uprating the main pensioner benefits in line with RPI, pensioners are facing in some cases a decline in real terms in their weekly income. A regular claim made by the Government—we heard it from the Minister a few moments ago—is that they have moved up to 2 million pensioners out of poverty. However, let us not forget the context. Help the Aged has calculated that there are 1.3 million pensioners with incomes just 10 per cent. above the poverty threshold of 60 per cent. of median income. I hope that the Minister, while no doubt wanting to claim credit for the work done by the Government in the past nine years, will accept that there is much more to do to tackle pensioner poverty. In that spirit of working harder and doing more in future to fight pensioner poverty, does he agree that moving some pensioners from just below the poverty threshold to just above it is not really what this is about? It may hit a narrow target, but we need to cast our minds towards some depressing statistics about pensioner fuel poverty. Would the Minister like to comment on the fact that the number of people in pensioner households living in fuel poverty—that is, where the household spends more than 10 per cent. of income on fuel to maintain a satisfactory temperature, which is usually defined as 21° C for the main living area and 18° C for other occupied rooms—will have doubled since 2004? Whatever we talk about in terms of improving the outlook for pensioners trying to get out of poverty, those are some fairly damning statistics, which simply are not good enough.