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Pensioner Poverty

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Williams, and to follow my colleague on the Committee, the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), as well as our Chair, whose introduction of the report brought to bear the knowledge that he has developed over the years. There is a lot of important background to the report. To start on a positive note, I am sure that the Minister was pleased to read in our report that we acknowledge the hard work done by the Government. Pensioner poverty has decreased in recent years. As the Chairman said, we acknowledge the important role of pensioner credit, the winter fuel payment, the increase in cold weather payments and other elements that help pensioners' lives, not least of which is free bus travel. I see many pensioners in my constituency taking advantage of free bus travel and enjoying themselves. Those things have helped pensioners, but the two recent Pensions Bills have also contained lots of improvements that should help reduce pensioner poverty in future, including the introduction of a credit for carers, a reduction in the number of qualifying years of national insurance contributions to 30—that will help everybody, especially women, to retire with a full state retirement pension—a proposal to uprate in line with earnings and the introduction of new personal accounts. We all want those improvements to happen sooner rather than later so that people get used to saving for their retirement and build up a personal pension pot as well as their entitlement to a state retirement pension. Nevertheless, the reason for the Committee's report is that we are all too aware that too many pensioners still live in poverty. We set ourselves a comprehensive task. Page 9 of our report sets out the terms of reference, the extent of which shows that the problem has many different angles that need to be considered. We wanted to know what the Department for Work and Pensions was doing to address the issue, but we also wanted to know what specific groups were more vulnerable to poverty in old age. The terms include the impact of the financial crisis on pensioner poverty. Much of the debate about the global financial crisis has focused on people in work, but it also affects pensioners, some of whom, of course, are also in work. Other issues include benefits take-up, the basic state pension, disability living allowance, attendance allowance and carers' allowance, which all affect the problem. Are lump sum payments such as the winter fuel payment the right way to address pensioner poverty? Also, of course, there is the Government's overall welfare reform programme. That is why the report is comprehensive. We received a huge amount of evidence from a variety of different people.