I was asked about the issue when I appeared before the Select Committee, and I said that I sympathised with the pensioners we were talking about.
I commented that my sympathy would butter no parsnips, meaning that it would not be worth a huge amount to the people involved, but I was vilified for using that phrase. I am not quite sure what to say, but I sympathise with the point that was made.
My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West gave an example of someone on a pension of a few pounds a week being topped up by the Australian Government. I do not know about the individual case, but in general if all we did was increase that pension, we would not necessarily increase the pensioner’s standard of living, because all that would do is take money out of what they get from the Australian Government. If we are concerned about their standard of living, increasing their pension in a means-tested system would not necessarily help.
The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) asked about giving women between 51 and 53 a choice, and when the shadow Minister was asked for his opinion, he said that it was that we should have a review. Obviously that plays to the gallery and sounds sympathetic, but it is not actually suggesting a solution. The complexity that the hon. Lady and I have talked about is not so much that we could not give people all the information, because we could, although it is complicated to put across; the problem is that nobody knows what their future is. A woman could choose to take the single-tier pension on day one, which would look like the right thing to do because she would get more than she does under the current system, but if her husband died the next day she would not get a derived widow’s pension and she would have made herself worse off as a result.