---

Vera Baird (Redcar) (Lab): May I take the hon. Gentleman back to his point about carers? It is relatively easy to decide when a woman is at home caring for a child because one can see the child. At the moment, what triggers a woman's receipt of a carer's credit is the fact that the person for whom she is caring receives the disability living allowance, which requires 35 hours of care. That is a very clear trigger that makes it easy to attribute the credit. If we are to allow part-time caring and part-time work to be taken into account—which I accept is right and is what, in reality, many women do—how will we trigger the award of the credit? That is a very difficult issue.

Mr. Webb: The hon. and learned Lady makes a critical point, and suggests why we concluded that the answer to the problem of national insurance is not to invent increasingly complex ways of plugging all the gaps. Instead, we should sweep the current arrangements away and base pension entitlement on citizenship. She is quite right—if we give money to full-time carers, there are practical problems in working out what we would give to part-time carers or people with two low-paid jobs and so on. I pay tribute to her and organisations such as the Fawcett Society, Age Concern and the Equal Opportunities Commission for raising those issues, but I disagree about their strategy which, although it may be realistic about how far the Government are willing to go, would plug the myriad gaps in the system. However, if one did so, the pension would still be 100 per cent. inadequate and operating it, as she suggested, would be complex and difficult.

The Liberal Democrats want the money that is currently spent on bureaucracy, qualifications, rules and regulations to be spent on pensions. It should not be devoted to bureaucracy but should go to front-line pensions. My response to the hon. and learned Lady, therefore, is that we should not devise ever more complex rules to bring more people into the net. Instead, we should say that citizens who satisfy a test of residency are entitled to a decent pension.

Mr. Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab): The women of this country should know exactly what the hon. Gentleman's policy is. He will know that a large number of women did not opt for the married woman's pension, but voluntarily paid the full contribution. His reply to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) suggested that the Liberal Democrats would abolish those distinctions and qualifications, so is he telling those hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women who deliberately did not choose the lower rate but wanted to pay for the full pension that they were foolish to do so?

Mr. Webb: Women who paid the full stamp currently qualify for a wholly inadequate basic state pension of
 
14 Sept 2004 : Column 1195
 
less than £80 a week. We propose a citizen's pension, which would be paid regardless of someone's contribution record at a rate of £105 a week for the over-75s. We would not make a distinction between people who had paid different rates, people who had been carers or had brought up children, but the women highlighted by the right hon. Gentleman would be substantially better off than at present. Like me, he knows that many women made the wrong choice about whether or not to pay the full stamp—they were misled or did not have accurate information and have retired in penury. We believe that that injustice needs to be put right.

Mr. Field: Would not the Liberal Democrats' position be stronger if they dropped all that old claptrap about a citizen's pension and merely said that they are going into the election with a strong policy on a significant increase for the oldest pensioners? That might win them support in very different places around the country.

Mr. Webb: The right hon. Gentleman's antipathy to the concept of a citizen's pension may derive from the fact that he has never had any time for shirkers. He has a horror of people who, for want of a better phrase, I shall call surfers, who spend their entire life surfing and draw a full pension on retirement because they are citizens. However, the citizen's pension does not allow people to be surfers or shirkers. We will not allow them to draw social security benefits or credits unless they satisfy rules on searching for work or unless they make a contribution. The people whom the right hon. Gentleman is worried about are bound by the present system to seek work and so on if they want support. It is therefore inconceivable that someone could spend their entire adult life shirking and drawing money from the state before receiving a pension on retirement. The citizen's pension proposal is therefore not vulnerable to the problems which, he believes, would affect a citizen's income proposal. That is not what we are proposing at all.

Mr. Field: I am merely suggesting that there is a more attractive way of presenting the hon. Gentleman's policies. It is important that we achieve agreement, so it is not a question of whether or not we go down the citizenship pension route. Nobody in their right mind thinks that people will deliberately make certain decisions so that after 15 years of receiving a pension they will qualify for other benefits under the Liberal Democrat proposal. It is not a question of citizenship—the greatest need is among the oldest pensioners, and that issue unites all the parties. Talking about citizenship pensions or non-citizenship pensions divides our forces instead of uniting them.

Mr. Webb: As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we agree about the particular needs of the older pensioners, and I am happy to concur with him on that. Suppose, however, that we were to add £25 to whatever pension a pensioner over 75 happened to draw, many of the women to whom I am referring draw such abjectly pathetic pensions that even £25 on top would still leave them below the poverty line and needing to claim the sort of means-tested benefits on which the right hon. Gentleman wants less reliance.
 
14 Sept 2004 : Column 1196
 

In other words, the right hon. Gentleman and I share a view, first, that the older pensioners are particularly needy and deserving of further support. Secondly, he and I want to reduce reliance on means-testing. My worry about his proposal is that if we had an across-the-board increase for the over-75s but left the contribution-based pension intact—not the citizenship-based one—there would still have to be quite a lot of means-testing, which both he and I want to get rid of.

Mr. Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne) (Con): As I understand it, the hon. Gentleman's proposal for a citizen's pension depends crucially on a residence test, but I have unaccountably been unable to find any details of how that test would be defined or how it would work. Can he assist me?

Mr. Webb: Certainly. There are already residence tests of the sort we have in mind in the social security system. The hon. Gentleman will be familiar with the pension—I think it is the category D pension, although I am open to correction on that—payable from the age of 80 onwards, which is non-contributory in the existing system and is subject only to a residence test. What we have in mind are residence tests of the sort that are already in the system, but one of the problems is that the data available to us as an Opposition party, which would enable us to come up with a precise definition, are very limited. We know that the general approach would be that people could not come straight off the boat at Dover and claim a pension—that is not how it would work—but would need to have established a significant connection with the United Kingdom, including in the period up to retirement. We will consider the exact details in due course—perhaps at my earliest opportunity, should I form part of the first Cabinet of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Inverness, West (Mr. Kennedy).

Kevin Brennan (Cardiff, West) (Lab): If that is the hon. Gentleman's proposal, is it not wrong to call it a citizen's pension? Does that not mislead the public? Many of my constituents are not citizens of the UK and would feel excluded by that title. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

Mr. Charles Kennedy (Ross, Skye and Inverness, West) (LD): Call it the people's pension.

Mr. Webb: Perhaps my right hon. Friend has been spending too much time with the Prime Minister's former press secretary lately.

The point that we want to establish is the distinction from a contributory national insurance-based system, which has been described as a system of exclusion. National insurance these days is about excluding women, carers and the lower-paid. We value caring. We value bringing up the next generation. We value looking after older people. We support people who, through no fault of their own, have to do grotty part-time jobs that none of us would ever want to do, and we say that they have had a hard enough time for long enough. The injustice cannot be allowed to roll on for decades. Let us sort it out now.

---