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Benefits Uprating

I am grateful to the Minister for advance sight of the statement. May I offer her my commiserations? When there is good news, the Secretary of State comes to the House to make the statement; when it is bad news, the Minister of State does so. I therefore thank her for coming to the House with this statement. However, we had hoped that it would provide us with the bits that the Chancellor forgot yesterday. When we saw a copy of it a few moments ago, we anticipated the Minister explaining that April's rise in child benefit and disabled people's benefit was temporary, and that when the 2011 increase comes about it will be as if the 2010 increase had never happened. Mysteriously, she forgot that as well. I wonder whether her Department actually knew, or knows, about this; when we read the small print of the pre-Budget report last night, we spotted the problem and I challenged the Minister's ministerial colleague, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), about it in the Chamber. I asked whether there would be real-terms cuts in 2011, to which the hon. Lady replied:""I do not think that there will be a real-terms cut"—[Official Report, 9 December 2009; Vol. 502, c. 424.]" Will this Minister clarify whether the Department was told about the issue in advance, and indeed whether it knows now, that what it proposes is a real-terms increase before the election and a real-terms cut after the election? Is that not a definition of cynicism? The Minister mentioned additional pension and the state earnings-related pension scheme, or SERPS. Surely the Government could have indexed SERPS if they had wanted to; pensioners who heard that they were getting 2.5 per cent. would hardly have thought that the Government were picking and choosing which bits of their pensions to index and which bits not to. Can the Minister confirm that next year SERPS will be indexed fully in line with the RPI, and not clawed back as child benefit and disability living allowance have been? Can she also confirm that more than 10 million families and disabled people will, as the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said, be subject to a real-terms cut—by definition—between 2010 and 2011, because whatever the inflation rate in September 2010, the Government will put less than that on the benefit rates for 2010? That is a real cut; it must be. Will she confirm that? Among the additional pension components is the graduated retirement benefit. That is not subject to contracting-out issues, so will the Minister confirm that she will index that benefit, which many older pensioners receive? I am sure that she will, because there is no reason not to. Had we had a real-terms increase in 2010 for disabled people and families that was a permanent feature of the system, we would have welcomed it unreservedly. As it is, it is a temporary, pre-election feature of the system. It should have been made permanent. We all hoped that the statement today would make that clear; it is almost as if the Government are embarrassed about what they have done.