Social Security

And, as my hon. Friend reminds me from a sedentary position, after two changes of Secretary of State. We also know that take-up of the benefits, which are the subject of the order, is low and needs to be higher. The latest statistics show that in 2002–03 alone, pensioners were failing to claim up to £2.9 billion in means-tested benefits. That low take-up might explain in part why 2 million pensioners are still living in poverty. That is not acceptable, and all politicians of good will find it so and want to come up with solutions to solve the problem. The Minister told us in December that in relation to council tax benefit take-up, the Pension Service is ringing up pensioners in receipt of pension credit to encourage and help them to apply for council tax benefit and housing benefit, if they are entitled to them, in order to increase take-up. It would be useful if the Minister were to give us more detail than was available in December to explain what targets he has in relation to that statement, and what progress he expects. As a direct result of the huge failure of many occupational schemes over the past seven years, many pensioners find that they do not have the resources and income for which they were hoping, and find themselves in poverty and relying on the benefits that are the subject of both orders. We know that the Chancellor, in his first emergency Budget of July 1997, raided pension funds to the then value of £5 billion a year. Under the Chancellor’s watch, we have had a poorly performing stock market in this country relative to other mature, western industrialised economies, longevity has increased, which the actuarial profession—oddly, in my view—did not predict as well as it might have done, and more pension funds are closing. We were reminded, in a reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond), that more than 60,000 occupational pension schemes with a total membership of more than 1 million people have been wound up or have begun the process of winding-up since Labour took office in 1997. Alongside an £800 billion black hole in public sector pension funds, and a £93 billion deficit in the pension funds of major businesses, those figures show that more and more pensioners face an uncertain future, and a future on benefit. Will the Minister give us his views on that, and share with us, as much as he is able to do, the Department’s thoughts on the Turner proposals? Let me remind the House of what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) said last year in relation to the issue of pensioners and their incomes:"““The big issue that ought to be worrying the whole of the Government, because it’s worrying voters, is that when Labour came to power we had one of the strongest pension provisions in Europe and now probably we have some of the weakest.””" That bears directly on benefit take-up and on the amount of money that many of the people who will be affected by the orders will take home, either in terms of in-work benefit or help when they are pensioners. When this debate takes place at the same time next year, I hope that fewer people will be in dependency, and that fewer people will need support, either because they have got back into work or have been able to make arrangements in relation to their pensionable age so that they do not have low incomes and do not have to rely on benefit when they do not wish to do so. However, given the confused approach that the Government have demonstrated in relation to Turner, with the Treasury saying one thing and the Department for Work and Pensions saying another, and the gaping holes in the welfare reform proposals of the January Green paper, the major part of which will not take effect until 2008 in any event, my concern is that we might not see any change in the next 12 months, and that when we debate the issue again, too many of our fellow citizens will too often have to rely on benefits.