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Pensions Bill

It is good to end the Report stage on a similar consensual note to that which characterised most of our Committee proceedings. In the brief amount of time that is available I will try to respond positively to this group of amendments and to the campaigning of my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble). New clause 28 and amendment No. 15 introduce a new regulation-making power that would be used to extend the carers credit to those certified as engaged in at least 20 hours of caring a week by health or social care professionals. There has been an attempt to encapsulate the spirit of some of my remarks in Committee, and it is therefore unsurprising that we are sympathetic to the intention behind the amendments. The amendments are, however, not strictly necessary. The regulation power under the Bill is drawn widely enough to allow us to include people engaged in caring. We therefore would not need to introduce further legislation to put into practice the intention of these amendments. As I said in Committee, our plan is that in order to be eligible for the carers credit people would have to self-certify. There is no perfect way of doing that: the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said that it was not a perfect measure, but there is no perfect measure. We are trying to avoid the carer having to have a time sheet and therefore we want to have a self-certification process, but we need a lock in the system which is why they will have to identify someone for whom they are caring, and we say that that should be someone in receipt of attendance allowance, the highest or middle rate of disability living allowance or constant attendance allowance. The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire asked how much we are prepared to spend on this. We are prepared to spend—and have costed in—enough to get to that population whose hours are above 20 a week but who are not building up a full state pension. Everybody shares the goal of enabling those 40,000 people to qualify for the basic state pension and, more importantly, for their state second pension, and the intention is to do exactly that. I hope that that gives the hon. Gentleman the reassurance that he needs. This is not a question of finance; it is a question of trying to find a way of getting people to self-certify and to get the qualification that they need. Committee members will recall our discussion on this subject and particularly the heartfelt and persuasive speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North, who has campaigned on it assiduously and passionately.