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Pensions Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the thrust of the amendments in much the same way as has the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. Whether this is the right way forward I do not know, but we have all identified that there is a problem. There will be a group, particularly of women—although there may be some men who currently would come under pension credit—who are among the poorest, because they are eligible for pension credit, and who have very reduced employment prospects and very poor life expectancy. That goes together. They are poor, their health is not good and they would normally have been eligible for pension credit. We have heard various ways of looking at it. We could try to target the group or we could target their income. The question is who we should pay and how much we should pay in order to produce a more decent approach, if you like, to helping this group of women. Who should we pay? I suggest that we already know and we already have the architecture, to borrow a phrase from the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, in place—the structure of pension credit. We know which women would have qualified for pension credit, were the existing rules in place. This builds on the proposition of my noble friend Lady Drake. To whom would it therefore be paid? To those women—and perhaps men—who would have qualified for pension credit under the existing structure. No new structure would need to be identified, nor would we have to dismantle the way that we currently do it. How much should we pay? As I argued earlier, I myself go for an age-related addition that might be something in the order of £30 for a single person, which would not take you up to the pension credit level of £132 but would at least take you up to the BSP figure of £97 from the current figure of about £65 as a halfway house, recognising that you cannot simply try to reinstate by amendment the existing system as is. That is one possible way forward, using the pension credit structure to identify but paying a figure actually at the BSP. I am not able at the moment to identify what the costs of that would be—I will do some work on this. However, given that there seems to be consensus around this place, it would be helpful if the Minister, who has this facility, could write to us before Report and tell us what such a proposition might look like and whether it is a feasible way to help those women who are least able to bear the changes that are going to be thrust upon them by law.