Pensions Bill

My Lords, I understand the reaction. Serious work has been done and continues to be done on that. It is a very important matter. Until we have a better understanding of the potential effects, we cannot judge the viability of this option. I make no bones of the fact that this further analysis will be far from straightforward, as we do not necessarily know where these people are living now and where they were living in the past. I appreciate that this is not what my noble friend was hoping for. However, I assure her that we have given her proposal serious and detailed consideration, and will continue to do so while looking at alternative options. As she is aware, any necessary changes to the time limits for paying class 3 contributions could be made by secondary legislation. However, I stress that the amendment would limit to nine the number of years for which people could pay voluntary contributions, and this is surely not the desired outcome. Technically, the amendment as drafted is defective. I shall emphasise the dilemma here. We sympathise with the objective, and further work will be done to see whether we can contain the sort of costs I have been talking about. We must be extremely careful about opening up a channel to genuinely help a range of women who have missed out in the past and, by doing so, allowing in an armada, which would have huge public expenditure costs, a lot of it possibly for people resident overseas—resources we could deploy in a variety of other, more beneficial ways. It is a real dilemma. Under the present provisions, people who have been working and have paid national insurance contributions for three years generally can still for the rest of their lives pay class 3 contributions and accrue entitlement to the UK basic state pension. The 25 per cent de minimis rule has been inhibiting some of that.