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Pensioner Poverty

My hon. Friend makes the point only too clearly. I would argue that we have to get much smarter in ensuring that we are targeting not just benefits and credits but help with insulation grants and the boiler replacement scheme announced yesterday, if nothing else. I do not know exactly how that would work; I know that the budget is limited. We are now into a new scrappage scheme. I would like that to go principally to our older people because they are the very people who will not do it—they cannot necessarily afford to do it, but they really need to do it. I have just a few other comments, although I do not want to speak for long. I entirely support my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North—I am sure that he will be completely unshocked to hear that—on retying the state pension to average earnings. I go along entirely with what he says. I have a question for my hon. Friend the Minister. We are only two and a bit years away from when this is supposed to come in—it is supposed to happen in 2012. The parties are all agreed, although we can argue for perhaps a year either way. One presumes that an immense amount of work is being done to make it happen, yet I have seen relatively little published by the Government about the mechanism for moving to retying, and the effect on pension credits and other benefits. I go along with what my hon. Friend said, but I believe that it will have to be done incrementally, to some extent. In effect, we are trying to turn back the clock how many years? It has been a great many years since the terrible decision was taken to break the earnings link. I just want to be assured that we will not get to 2012 and then suddenly be told that the work is not done, the computer system is not ready or it is all too expensive, because if there is one thing that will detach pensioners from the voting population, given that they tend to vote in greater numbers than any other group, it is total disillusion over something that they have been promised and have fought for through the National Pensioners Convention and so on. It is now being realised after the political parties have agreed to it, but where is the mechanism by which it will happen? Much as I agree with what my hon. Friends and the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) said on specific issues, I want to raise what I think is still a great unfairness: the failure to allow disability living allowance to be paid to pensioners who did not claim it when they were of working age. We discussed this during the proceedings on the Equality Bill, and there are hon. Members present who will remember some of those discussions. We have to come up with a valid reason why we are doing what we are. My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) spoke about explaining to pensioners who have not made full contributions why what is happening is happening. The most difficult letters I get are from people who may be slightly over retirement age who have not claimed beforehand but suddenly feel that their disability is such that they need to claim. They are told, "Oh, no, you are entitled to attendance allowance only, and it is always at the lower rate," and so on. We need to see that as an issue. The most important thing, of course, is mobility. The one thing that pensioners have really benefited from, as my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) said, is free bus travel, yet if one is in any way incapacitated and unable to get a mobility allowance, that is a somewhat pyrrhic victory as they cannot actually get places. We need to look at that carefully. My last point is about the retirement age. This is difficult, because we all know that it will probably be increased further by current financial difficulties, but there is great unfairness around the operation of early retirement. I have always argued that there is a fundamental difference between the social classes because people of lower income, unless they go on early retirement for sickness reasons, are highly unlikely ever to be able to retire on such a scheme, whereas all manner of professional classes, whether in the private or public sector, have come up with advantageous packages and are able to go young. I use my own cousin as an example. I hope that he does not read this. He was a head of department in a secondary school and retired at 50 because of a merger—one of them had to go. In effect, for ever and a day, he is on half his teaching salary with an enhancement. I am sure that nowadays we will have to get much tougher, but there is a hell of a disparity between people who retired in the past and who have managed to do quite nicely out of it, compared with people who have had to go on. We would welcome people going on, given how we attacked the matter in the Equality Bill. We would want to prevent people from not being allowed to go on post-state retirement age, whether it is 65, 66 or whatever. We allow and encourage that, but, for some people, it is not a choice but a reality. They have little or no pension, and they are not able to call on early retirement schemes. I know the nuclear industry very well. We talk about its liabilities as though they are all to do with horrible stuff that we have to stick in the ground at some time, but they are not all that. Some are human liabilities incurred when the industry had a massive enhancement programme to allow people to go early—to get them off the books, which was considered to be helpful. Compare that with someone who has been in a low-paid job all their life who has to keep going because they have little or no pension. That is a great unfairness, and the Government should do anything that they can to eradicate the gap, to address the poverty of those who have no choice but to keep going and to make sure that they do not do it when it is completely unfair. We should look at that and do something about it.