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Financial Assistance Scheme (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2007

Whether it made any difference would depend on which timescale you made the judgment over. Clearly, when you move into an altered regime where the structure of the tax system is different, with lower rates but without the imputation repayable tax credits, all the various components of that would not necessarily have had the pluses and minuses for outcomes at the same point in time. If you look over a period, it was the right decision, and would therefore not have had any significant impact on the assets of pension schemes overall. If you looked at any particular year, whether it did or did not would depend on which year you chose. I do not believe that pursuing that point is genuinely productive in trying to fully understand what happened to schemes. That is very clear from the impressive Turner report which gave us the basis for the key changes that we made this year and will make next year. That was his judgment and the judgment of others as well. On whether it is done progressively or not, the change made in 1997 was accompanied by a change in the rate of corporation tax. That effectively did not happen when the changes and reductions undertaken by his party took place generally, apart from one exception, with which I will not bore the Committee, when there was a change in the rate of corporation tax because there was a change in the rate of first-year allowances. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, noted the demise of the de minimis £10 and asked whether we should have a de minimis at all. In considering any detailed implementation of proposals we expect to stem from the Young review, we can consider whether it makes sense to make small payments in the form of regular payments or in some other way. The administrative issue that the noble Lord raises is reasonable. On the number of people who are currently being paid £10 or below, the de minimis has already been lifted for initial payments. We debated that in the Pensions Bill 2007. Significant numbers may already be receiving less than that amount, but I do not have a number. If we can readily obtain one, I would be more than happy to provide that information to the noble Lord. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, referred to the 25p for the over-80s. If I were a betting man, I would bet that that will be gone before the noble Lord reaches his entitlement to it, but who knows? He also asked about the cost to date. Two figures are always used: a net present value figure, which is associated with the basis on which these things are reported and the resource accounts; and the cash figure, which is just the sum total of the cash amount over the whole life of the scheme. I do not have right up-to-date cost estimates, but I do not think that there is any significant difference. In the previous cost estimates, the cash figure is a smidgeon under £8 billion, which is a cumulative figure that takes us to where we are, including the provisions in these regulations. The net present value of that is £1.86 billion. Both noble Lords made reference to the 90 per cent figure of entitlement. As was made clear previously, and was emphasised by the Prime Minister at Question Time, the extra value that we believe is possible from the Young review, together with matching funds, would take us towards 90 per cent. On the basis of the Prime Minister’s announcement, that 90 per cent is now guaranteed. We have to await publication of the Young review to see quite how the extra assets are—