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Pensioner Poverty

I take my hon. Friend's point. That is not a road that I particularly want to travel, but there have been some fairly scandalous examples of offspring being too eager to get their hands on their inheritance before there is a natural death—I think I will leave it at that. In considering pensioner poverty, it is important not only to look at the income side but to look at the expenditure side too. There is no doubt at all that schemes such as free bus travel and winter fuel allowance have been major instruments in assisting retired people to reduce their expenditure and thus hold off the onset of poverty. The warm homes scheme itself has improved the heating systems of some 2.5 million pensioner households, through insulation, cavity wall insulation and so on. Again, that has the impact of reducing pensioners' fuel bills. However, in our report we make the point that retired people are far less likely than the general population to switch their fuel provider. If someone has a basic acumen about the internet, they can switch their supplier online fairly easily, but the elderly are a group for whom that is not the norm. Retired people tend to stick with their supplier, which they may have been with for the past 20 or 30 years. Quite considerable savings can be made by switching supplier and, given that people's income gets lower and more fixed as they get older, the more important those savings are. There is a long history of pensioner poverty. I am absolutely certain there will be more debates about it in the future. The changes that were introduced post-Turner were meant to ensure that we would have far less pensioner poverty in the future. I do not think that we will ever eliminate pensioner poverty. However, the principal instrument or change that is supposed to be introduced in 2012 is auto-enrolment, so that everybody hopefully would be in some scheme, even if it was only the personal account with a fairly modest contribution of 8 per cent. to it. In that way, everybody would be on the building blocks of the basic state pension and the state second pension, which will continue. Of course, that excludes people who are not in work. Frankly, all Governments have a pretty poor record of dealing with those people, particularly those with a disability. When somebody at birth has a very severe disability, it is not right to say to them, "You will be poor in childhood, you will be poor in your working age and you will be poor in retirement". Yes, we have built in assumptions that people with a severe disability are contributing to the state pension and the state second pension, but those people will still receive only an extremely modest income in retirement. As we move forward in the coming years, and hopefully as the public finances improve, we need to focus on that area and ask ourselves what we can do better for those disabled people, so that they do not experience a lifetime—from birth to death—of poverty.