Saving Gateway Accounts Bill

This amendment adds a few words to Clause 2(1). Under this subsection the commissioners must issue notices of eligibility. My amendment provides that they may either issue the notices of eligibility or cause them to be issued. In part this picks up the theme I have been developing in the previous amendments because, as I have said, it is not entirely clear why HMRC should be the lead department. Even if it is, it is not clear that it should be the sole body handling the paperwork for saving gateway accounts. The amendment would allow HMRC to arrange with another body, perhaps DWP, the issue of notices of eligibility—in the case of DWP, it would be at the point when the benefits are actually set up. It would then only be necessary for DWP to tell HMRC which notices have been issued. The amendment would also allow HMRC to subcontract the operation of saving gateway accounts to a private sector operator, if that was thought desirable. My amendment is entirely permissive. I would argue that it is desirable because it would give flexibility in the event that the saving gateway account processes have to be changed if we find, as we have found in other areas, that HMRC does not handle these accounts well. As I have said, it is naturally a gatherer of taxes and not a payer of benefits. Tax credits have not really changed that. If the Government’s experiment with using HMRC fails, my amendment would give the Government an easy way to rectify the scheme without needing primary legislation to change the scheme or having to do something inappropriate, as they had to do with the tax credit system, which produced a massive £25,000 income disregard simply to save the scheme. I would have thought that the Government would welcome having more flexibility built into this Bill to take account of what might go wrong and what might even be reasonably predicted to go wrong. I beg to move.