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Pensions Bill

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate and to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden). The debate is being held against a background of pension tax, which devastated and undermined what at least one Labour Member recognised as one of the strongest pension systems in Europe. As my hon. Friends have said, we have witnessed the calamitous loss of defined benefit pension schemes, partly as a consequence of such undermining. The hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) powerfully showed that under this Government a massive escalation in personal debt has eclipsed the amount of national wealth created in a year. We must consider the Bill, which appears to be fair and on which a degree of consensus has been built up, against that backdrop. The Secretary of State tried to use the consensus, which is based on the need to encourage saving for the future because things are so uncertain in the future, like a hammer to oppose anyone who questioned him. The consensus is that those with the least in our society need to have a stake in society and security in old age, but that will not come from filling in long, complicated documents to obtain their council tax benefit, to pay their rent, to purchase food or to buy a present for their grandchildren. That is the current situation, when 1.5 million or more pensioners who are eligible for benefits do not claim them for reasons that hon. Members on both sides of the House decry. When the Minister for Pensions Reform winds up the debate, I ask him not to suggest that anyone who thinks that there are problems with the specifics of how the Bill will work is engaged in political point-scoring, which is the last thing that anyone wants to do. I am certain that my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) did not seek to do that in his measured, solid and serious contribution to the debate, which, sadly, followed a weak effort, which would have been hilarious if the issue were not so serious, by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State's contribution was poor.