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Social Security

We did look at that. Either one could say that what one is trying to do with pensions and benefits is protect pensioners' spending power—that would be a price measure—or one could protect people's position relative to the rest of society, which is an earnings measure. One wants to avoid silly small figures such as 75p, which is where the 2.5% comes from. To say, ““But we will measure inflation according to different measures and we will pick the biggest”” conceptually does not work for me. We could have done that, but in our judgment the point of revaluation is to maintain spending power fairly for the group in question. Our judgment is that CPI is the answer to that question. There is a separate question about whether pensions should be higher or lower. In a way, the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran are saying that we should be paying bigger pensions. It seems to me that that is an entirely separate debate from how we should correct for inflation. That is where CPI comes in.