My hon. Friend, as ever, is sharp on these matters. Amendment 1, which stands in his name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), would delete clause 20. As the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out, that would do nothing for any of the overseas pensioners who have contacted us as their MPs; it would only remove the freezing for single-tier pensioners. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) understands that point, but I just want to be clear that if we voted for the amendment, all we would be doing is creating a new anomaly.
In a sense, the Chair of the Select Committee urged us to create that new anomaly. She said that we cannot defend the old one and that we should at least not carry on with it, but by doing that we would create a new anomaly. It is not just about which side of the Niagara falls one happens to live on, because single-tier pensioners would get indexation but nobody else would. I think that we all know what would happen: we would end up back in court. My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West referred, quite properly, to the extensive legal background to the issue, because it has been tried and tested by the International Consortium of British Pensioners in a range of courts, and all have found that in many cases what the Government are doing is implementing the law of the land as it has stood for decades.
My hon. Friends the Members for Worthing West and for North Thanet went to see the Prime Minister, and I am grateful to them for doing so. The hon. Member for Worthing West referred to the reply he received today from the Prime Minister—I am pleased that he replied in advance of the debate—who stated that, having reflected on their arguments, he did not feel that a further review was appropriate at this point. Obviously, the context he referred to is the £700 million cost of indexing those pensions. The hon. Member for North Thanet said that they were not asking for that to be backdated, but I speculate that as soon as we start indexing pensions and stepping them back up to where they would have been, the next court case will come when someone says, “Hang on a minute. Since you froze my pension I have missed out on X amount of money, so I expect that to be paid back as well.” These wedges have a knack of having thin ends. The cost of addressing this, at £700 million a year, is already substantial, but backdating would lead to far more substantial costs, which is difficult to justify at present.