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Pensions Bill [HL]

I shall try to pick up some of the points put by the noble Lord, Lord Freud. This amendment breaks the link between the state pension age and the pension credit qualifying age only until 2020 because the associated amendment puts a time limit on that. It seeks to replicate the 1995 timetable for equalisation because it is trying to address a problem created by the acceleration of the original timetable. It is not seeking to bind the Government’s hand once that problem has been dealt with. The amendment would allow the Government to restore the link between the state pension age and the pension qualifying age. In another place, in another debate, I might want to argue the merits of not doing that, but that is not what this amendment seeks to do. We have sought to avoid the complication of that debate. It is merely for a defined period to address this disproportionate income impact point from this accelerated timetable. It is true that I addressed the maximum possible loss. I think I actually said that it would apply to people experiencing the full two-year deferral. However, even with a one-year deferral, one year’s worth of pension credit for the people we are talking about is a substantial amount of money. If I lacked precision in how I articulated the point, I do not think that it lost any merit because losing pension credit for a year when you are dreadfully poor is pretty painful. It just happens to be even more painful if you lose it for two years. In terms of the disproportionate impact, there has to be something wrong with the argument that we have to accelerate this timetable because somehow it makes a major contribution to long-term fiscal sustainability, which I reject. In applying it, we look to the most vulnerable to make such a big contribution. We are saying to them, ““Would you please forgo 10 per cent of your state pension income in order to contribute?””. This contribution to an argument about long-term fiscal sustainability does not hold up in detail under the microscope. It does not run as a narrative. It does not run as an act of fairness that the poorest, many of whom will be women, many of whom will be disabled, take the heaviest hit. The department’s own analysis shows that this measure would be disproportionate in terms of its ethnic impact. Furthermore, these people will have a lower life expectancy. One of the arguments that the Government have run in defence of their accelerated timetable is to say, ““Oh well, women in this age group will not be getting to their state pension age for maybe a year or two after they expected, but they are all going to live longer, so the total income they will receive over their lifetime is still a fair deal in relation to men””. However, you cannot run that argument with these people because they are far less likely to have that very long life expectancy, which is precisely why—I admire and am a fan of DWP impact assessments—the figures had to be weighted for the fact that the life expectancy for this group of people was likely to be lower, so the figure was raised to a 10 per cent loss. That makes my point, really. I do not have to do the arithmetic because it is there in the impact assessment. Notwithstanding an argument about the disproportionate impact of the accelerated timetable on women in their late 50s, this amendment says, ““If one drills down into the characteristics of the population group disproportionately affected, there is a really undesirable concentration effect on the very low paid and those with the lowest incomes””. I do not think that saying, in order to deal with that, that the pension credit lags behind state pension age up until early 2020 is a fundamental challenge to the principle that it is desirable that pension credit and state pension age go hand in hand. I will reserve dealing with that for another time. I think our argument is strong. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 7 withdrawn.