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Social Security

It gives me no great pleasure to recollect that I was one of those who served on the Committee that considered the State Pension Credit Bill during its passage through the House in 2002. If I had said to Ministers then that six years later their system would be so complicated and that so little of the money would be getting through to pensioners that those Ministers would come back before the House to plead for help from various worthy and important interest groups, and even from Members of Parliament, they would have laughed me out of court. We were told at the time that it was a wonderful system that people would find easy to use.