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Welfare Reform Bill

I commend my noble friend on this. It will be wonderful if it works. It will square the circle of trying to have targeted help while avoiding some of the problems of stigma that are associated with take-up. That would be splendid. My noble friend may have to wait until the scheme has been further designed, but how is he going to manage the income derived from capital rules on this? There is some research on why people do not claim pension credit. The biggest single reason is that because we have made it more generous—and rightly so—people towards the end get so little for the last £5 or so, that they decide that it is not worth the bother. There are also problems to do with the fact that people have applied for a different benefit in the past and therefore think that, as a result, they will lose this one. It might also be because they live with family members and think that they are not entitled when they are. We know quite a lot of the reasons for this but it seems that one of the practical problems about investigating people’s eligibility is that we know their income—which ought to be fine—but we do not always know about their capital and the putative income that is derived from it. I know that it has now gone up to £10,000, which is great, and I know that, as a result, we have removed some 70 per cent of pensioners from coming within the effect of that rule. Does my noble friend yet have enough information to be able to tell us how he will overcome that hurdle? I can see how the rest of it could work in a pilot, including the five-year rules and so on, but I do not yet see how you can get around this problem. Can my noble friend tell us? It may just be too early—I would obviously respect that—but it would be helpful to know what sort of shape it might take and how we could address the problems that have bedevilled automaticity in the past.