Welfare Reform Bill

My noble friend is right in a sense; it is too early to address that in detail. The group that we are particularly hoping to engage with this are those who may have somewhat small entitlements to pension credit and those on savings credit who perhaps do not understand that they are eligible to claim. They may not have worked out that their income and capital still permits them to make a claim. Obviously, there is a database, which I am sure is familiar to my noble friend, that has details of people’s income on it. It certainly holds some data about people’s capital holdings, such as bank accounts, ISAs, PEPs and TESSAs, but it does not necessarily have the totality of information on capital that we would need to be absolutely certain. That is one of the challenges that we face. We are helped by the change in the capital disregard that was put in place recently, and by the general data on the level of savings in aggregate that people have. I have forgotten the statistics, but something like 40 per cent of the population have savings income of less than £1. Although the average is higher, it is highly skewed at the top end. The points raised by my noble friend are very relevant. There are some challenges in moving forward on this, but there is an opportunity here that we must grasp.