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Pensions Bill

moved Amendment No. 130A: 130A: Clause 94, page 46, line 31, leave out ““debit”” and insert ““reduction”” The noble Baroness said: I shall speak also to the other three amendments in this group. This is a small bid for the proper use of the term ““debit and credit””. As the Minister knows, these are hallowed terms in accountancy and can be directly related back to the father of accounting, Fra Luca Pacioli, who recorded double-entry book-keeping in the late 15th century. Most people think of a credit as good, because they think that when they are in credit with the bank that is a positive thing, but in fact this credit is seen from the perspective of the bank’s accounts; they are on the liability side of the bank’s balance sheet. If an individual drew up their own accounts, they would have it on the debit side, representing an asset. As generations of accounting students learnt—including the Minister and me—debits can be assets, expenses or losses and credits can be liabilities, income or profit. So the term ““debit and credit”” does not have an unequivocal good-bad, positive-negative connotation. There are of course many more subtleties to double-entry book-keeping, but I shall not weary the Committee with them today. But for anyone who knows what a debit and a credit are—and that certainly includes the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and me—the wording of Clause 94 jars. We would never say that something becomes subject to a debit because an account is debited by an amount. In fact, we would not use the terms as they are used in the clause at all. My plea in these amendments is that the Department for Work and Pensions leaves accountants’ language alone and sticks to plain English, which is what my amendments seek to do. I beg to move.