My Lords, I made it clear at Second Reading that we support this Bill, and I have no wish to delay its implementation, so Amendment 3 is a probing amendment. I have tabled it to make sure that we get a chance to address the issue of pensioner poverty, which was raised by many noble Lords at Second Reading but did not get a substantive response, no doubt because time was tight. Fortunately, we have all the time in the world in Committee.
The number of poor pensioners had fallen significantly, largely down to the introduction of pension credit, but it is now a cause for concern again. The Government’s own figures show that 1.9 million pensioners are living in relative poverty, so this is something that we should all be concerned about. People who have worked all their lives should not be worrying in old age about how to make ends meet.
There are broader policy concerns too, such as the evidence showing that people on lower incomes have lower life expectancy and fewer years of healthy life after retirement. That is bad for the individual, but it is
also bad for the state. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that these health inequalities have an effect on state spending, leading to higher costs to the NHS and social care services. Has the Minister read the interesting recent report based on research commissioned from Loughborough University by Independent Age which suggests that the underclaiming of pension credit is costing the Government roughly £4 billion a year in increased NHS and social care costs? What does she make of that?
Taking pensioner poverty seriously means that when Ministers talk about their plans for the triple lock for the state pension, they should also be ready to talk about their plans for uprating the standard minimum guarantee in pension credit. That is the reason this amendment suggests that the uprating should be accompanied by a report on the implications for poverty. If pension credit is not uprated by an equivalent amount to the triple lock, the benefit of the increase in the state pension enabled by this Bill will be enjoyed in full, as I have said before, by many Members of this House, but not by the poorest pensioners, who will have it clawed back from pension credit.
Pension credit is key to tackling poverty because as well as topping up weekly income for poor pensioners it can be a passport to other benefits—housing benefit, council tax reduction, the cold weather payment and now the free TV licence for the over-75s. That could be worth up to £7,000 for some pensioners. Do not take my word for it. In giving evidence to the Scottish Social Security Committee on 23 January, a senior DWP official said
“In the UK, 16 per cent of pensioners are in poverty. If all those pensioners claimed pension credit, housing benefit and the council tax reduction—especially the council tax reduction—that would reduce the 16 per cent to almost zero.”
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The latest DWP paper on take-up that I could find came out last February but covered the period 2017-18. It said that only six in 10 of those eligible for pension credit are claiming it. That means 1.2 million eligible families did not claim the benefit and only 70% of the total amount of pension credit that could have been claimed was claimed—only 70%. That means that up to £2.5 billion of pension credit is going unclaimed, amounting to around £2,000 a year for each family who would be entitled to receive pension credit but did not claim. This take-up rate has basically stalled for a decade. It is crystal clear that, if the Government care about pensioner poverty—and they should—they need to care about the take-up of pension credit.
I am talking more than I expected to about this because we had a rather unsatisfactory debate in Oral Questions yesterday. In response to a Question from my noble friend Lord Foulkes, the Minister was not able to offer any indication that the DWP has a proper strategy for increasing pension credit take-up. It is not enough simply to say that Ministers want people to apply. The DWP did run a 12-week campaign starting in February but, as my noble friend Lord Foulkes pointed out yesterday, that campaign, plus online claims and the threat of losing free TV licences, resulted in fewer than 30,000 of those lost million-plus people making a claim.
Maybe that is because the key feature of the campaign was a video to be shown in GP surgeries and post offices—of course, we are now in a pandemic and most pensioners are not going to those places. The Minister acknowledged to me yesterday that, because of the pandemic, people were not able to access that information, but I asked if they would be running a fresh campaign instead. She said:
“At the moment there are no plans for a new campaign. We are working with stakeholders, who again are absolutely swamped by the impact of Covid, to ensure that the message gets out.”—[Official Report, 26/10/20; col. 14.]
She also said in response to other noble Lords that there were no plans for research and no plans for targets for take-up. So I ask the Minister, what is the Government’s plan to boost take-up of pension credit?
If there is no plan, I have some suggestions. First, the DWP needs a written strategy to boost pension credit take-up. It does not have one and that is a problem. They should publish one so that we can scrutinise it and hold Ministers to account. Secondly, there should be a proactive campaign targeted directly at those thought to be non-claimants, rather than just general information; it should prioritise those who need the money most and are the least likely to claim. That requires up-to-date data and good qualitative research. It also needs to be creative. I am told that, when pension credit was launched, there were roadshows in various community settings and the DWP sent out mobile vans to go around small towns and villages on market day in areas where data suggested take-up was low. Finding a Covid-secure version of that will take time, resources and creativity, and engagement with stakeholders. If, as the Minister says, stakeholders are swamped, will the Government consider funding them to get involved with this work?
Does the Minister agree with the points that I have made? Crucially, does she accept that the Government have a responsibility for tackling poverty across the UK and across the generations? I do not want to open up the debate that we had about intergenerational issues at Second Reading, although I feel very strongly about working-age benefits and working-age poverty, but it is a really interesting comparison. Because Ministers do not have a strategy for tackling child poverty—indeed, they repealed the Act that made them do so and refused to accept the internationally accepted measures of poverty—we are seeing the numbers of poor children in the UK rising. If Ministers were forcibly, legally committed to eradicating child poverty, they presumably would not have cut billions from working-age benefits.
I indicate now that I will not press this amendment to a vote, but I urge the Minister to accept it. The Committee deserves a comprehensive and serious response from the Government today. If that is not available, they could at least follow the spirit of this amendment and bring forward a report on these issues before Parliament soon. I beg to move.