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Pensions Bill

I shall be delighted if the debate on the amendment means again that not only two can play. I agree with what I am sure is the intention behind the noble Lord’s amendment—to highlight the continuing effect and amount of means-testing in the system and to see what can be done about reducing it or at least ensuring that the most high-risk groups are properly protected from it. We have already discussed the basic statistics and the basic problem at some length in our debate on the amendments that my noble friend Lady Thomas and I moved on a previous day to try to ensure that generic face-to-face advice was available to the high-risk groups, so I do not want to go over that again. I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, that the DWP recently published its estimates—I do not expect that those figures will change very much—of the proportion of pensioner households that will be subject to means-testing at different dates. They are, of course, exceptionally high. I remind noble Lords that under the new reform system, as the department calls it, the figure for 2020 is now 55 per cent and still 40 per cent for 2050. It might be worth pointing out that the DWP says that it is testing the sensitivities of these assumptions. It states that these four figures, "““have been tested for sensitivity to plausible changes in underlying assumptions about the future level and distribution of pensioner incomes and future growth in rents and council tax liability””," which is obviously significant. It continues: "““Based on these tests the proportion of pensioner households entitled to income related””—" in other words, means-tested— "““benefits in 2050 appear to be robust to the changes in assumptions, with pension credit varying by around five percentage points””," and the other benefits by very little. We all know that there will be a serious problem with means-testing for the foreseeable future. Although, if pressed, we would support amendments that seek to ensure that the Government update those estimates, in a way this amendment does not go far enough. I hope that all of us who are concerned about this will think carefully about this before Report. We need not only to know the shape of the figures, which are fairly clear, but to press the Government further on what we are going to do to protect the most at-risk groups.