My Lords, my expertise in the field of pensions is absolutely de minimis, so my questions may sound very basic. I am not going to raise any particular objection to this SI, but can the Minister explain to us what impact the increase in the threshold amount, which will come in later this week, will have on the women who are impacted by this statutory instrument? I am struggling to see how the two pieces interweave, and it might be quite helpful to understand the overall picture—I would appreciate that.
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Secondly, with the coming increase in the threshold—which we will speak about later this week—I wonder whether the Minister is at this point able to tell me the consequences for the National Insurance Fund, which will be receiving less money than it anticipated. Is
there any knock-on effect to the contribution that the National Insurance Fund then makes initially to the NHS and, presumably, eventually to social care, if that day ever dawns? I am just trying to see how the various pieces of all this fit together, and I wonder whether the Minister can be a little helpful on that point.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I do not think it would hurt to have been rather more generous to a group that is in a particularly awkward place when it comes to state pensions. We would not have insisted on absolute parallels between every recipient, particularly when we have a group that is fundamentally in a more disadvantaged situation.
This brings me to my final point. One of the endless irritations in trying to deal with these issues is that change comes in various Bills and statutory instruments and, frankly, for anyone other than an extreme specialist, it is nearly always impossible to see how all the various pieces tie together. I honestly do not know how employers manage to deal with all this, and I do not know how individuals manage to keep on top of the various pieces of information. Government websites help, but they also do not pull all the strands together. I have a feeling that is why we have this SI, because somebody missed this bit and suddenly realised it would need a separate piece of legislation.
This is an issue that I have raised over and over again with almost everything that we get from the Treasury. There needs to be some sort of coherent published tracking system. Indeed, it would help officials as well if they had a place to go to where essentially everything was marked up to date and they could see the history and the process of change. I have said before that this was done in the European Union in a far more complicated and complex setting—and done extremely successfully. I know that there is a government feeling that anything that was done well by the European Union needs to be disparaged and that we cannot follow or adopt it, but can we make an exception in this case, which is leaving so many people, frankly, confused?