PENSIONERS' PAYMENTS BILL (Hansard, 12 November 1974)

§ LORD WELLS-PESTELL
My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. As your Lordships will know, the Bill proposes a payment of £10 which, for the vast majority of the nine million persons who will qualify, will be made next week—the week beginning November 18. The Government expect all payments to be made before Christmas.
The fundamental difference between this Bill and previous similar Bills which came before your Lordships under the Conservative Administration is that this Bill will not only apply to the elderly. The bonus payment will be extended this year to about one million people under pensionable age. Those being brought 703 into the scope of the bonus payment for the first time are widows, the chronic sick and disabled who have not yet attained pensionable age.
I feel sure that the Bill will be welcomed in all parts of your Lordships' House. I imagine that my noble friend Lady Phillips will welcome the inclusion of younger widows in respect of whom she has in previous years made a special plea. Similarly the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, will recognise the inclusion of invalidity pensioners and the disabled for whose inclusion he put forward a very strong argument last year.
The Bill is a short one, and it will extend to Northern Ireland. Clause 1 lays down the conditions for entitlement to the bonus payment. These conditions are, first, that a person should in the week beginning November 18 be ordinarily resident or present in the United Kingdom or any other member State of the European Economic Community. For the purposes of the Bill, the United Kingdom includes the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. Secondly, a person must be entitled, or be treated as being entitled, to a payment of at least one of the certain specified qualifying benefits for a day of that week. A person who satisfies these conditions can get a further payment of £10 in respect of his wife, making £20 in all, if they are both over pensionable age.
Most wives of retirement pensioners, as noble Lords will be only too well aware, have a separate pension and will thus receive their £10 payment separately. Only one payment of £10 will be made in respect of any one person. The bonus payment will be tax free and will not affect entitlement to other benefits which are dependent upon means—such as supplementary benefit, rent allowance or rent rebate. The bonus will be paid in full to qualified persons in Part III accommodation and to those entitled who are in hospital.
Clause 2 lists the qualifying benefits which are retirement pension, including the over 80s pension; invalidity pension; all widow's benefits—whether those benefits are under the national insurance scheme, the industrial injuries scheme, and the war pensions scheme—attendance allowance; unemployability supplement, 704 which is payable under the industrial injuries and war pensions schemes to persons who are permanently unfit to work; and supplementary pension. War disablement pension will be a qualifying benefit where the person concerned is over pensionable age and retired, or over the age of 70 for a man and 65 for a woman, whether retired or not.
Clause 3 deals with the administration. The vast majority of payments will be made by the Post Office. I am sure your Lordships would wish me to pay tribute to the staff of the Post Office and to sub-postmasters who will undertake this work on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Security. Other payments will be sent by post, for the most part next week and in all cases before Christmas. I wish to extend my tribute to the staff of the Department of Health and Social Security who will arrange for payments to be sent to most of the younger beneficiaries to whom payment will go for the very first time.
Clause 4 covers the financial provisions. The cost of the payments in Great Britain will amount to about £92 million, of which over £88 million will fall on the National Insurance Funds. But national insurance contributions will not be speci ally increased to meet this cost. I do not think that it is necessary for me to com mend the Bill to the House. I believe that everyone will see it as a desirable measure. My Lords, I beg to move.

§ LORD ABERDARE
My Lords, I certainly welcome this Bill. As the noble Lord will recall, the whole idea of a Christmas bonus originated under the Conservative Government in 1972, when my right honourable friend Sir Keith Joseph, for the first time, introduced a similar Bill to give a £10 bonus to pensioners at Christmas. This has proved to be a very welcome payment indeed to pensioners; and it is a very pleasant thing that the State, which normally is an inhuman kind of being, is able to make this not very generous but at least token payment at this particular season of the year. I also very much welcome the fact that the Government have been able to extend the beneficiaries by a further 1 million people. Those to whom they 705 intend to pay this bonus who are below retirement age are certainly well deserving of it, but of course the difficulty always is to know where to draw the line. We had a fairly reasonably defensible line at retirement age, but now that the Government have gone below that line I wonder whether there will not be a number of other deserving cases of people who will feel that they have been excluded from this bonus and will press for their inclusion.
Equally, of course, there arises a dividing line on the date of eligibility. The noble Lord has explained to us that in this case the person who benefits has to qualify in the week ending November 23. This is in fact a week earlier than applied in the case of our Bills for bonus payments. There it was December 1, and there was a good deal of criticism from the then Opposition on behalf of those people who felt that they were excluded although they qualified between December 1 and December 25. Now, I am sure, there will be a further outcry from those people who feel that they would have qualified before December I but are now not qualified because the date has been advanced by one week. Would it be true to say that the reason for this is in fact because 1 million more people have been brought into the net?
My Lords, we have always accepted that it was right to look after the interests of the pensioners at a time of economic difficulty, and we fully support this Bill. In fact, we would have gone further and proposed a review of the pension twice yearly, but that has not so far, at least, appealed to the Government. We do not criticise this sort of expenditure, which is deliberately designed to help those people who are suffering from the effects of economic difficulty; we criticise the wrong use of valuable resources when they are spread over the board in such things as food subsidies and nationalisation, which is not relevant to our present economic difficulties.
My Lords, the noble Lord said that this Bill applied to Northern Ireland, but I see from Clause 2(3) that it also applies to the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man—that is quite understandable—and Gibraltar. I have wondered why Gibraltar should be brought in, and not any 706 other British territory. Why does Gibraltar benefit from this bonus payment? Why not Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands, the Seychelles and other such British territories? I should be interested to know. If the noble Lord cannot give me the answer immediately I shall quite understand because I have not been able to give him notice, but it struck me as a rather interesting point. Finally, my Lords, I join with the noble Lord in paying a very warm tribute to the staff of the Post Office, and also of his own Department, the Department of Health and Social Security, for undertaking the large amount of extra work which falls on their shoulders in making these payments.

§ LORD AMULREE
My Lords, on behalf of noble Lords on these Benches I should like very briefly to welcome the Bill we are looking at now. I am particularly interested in it for one good reason. I was pleased to see that among the extra million people who are going to benefit from this bonus are people who are receiving the attendance allowance, which is a matter in which I have a great personal interest. I was very pleased, too, to see that it applies to people in Part III accommodation under the local authorities, and to hospitals. Therefore, I have no real criticism to make of the Bill at all, but rather would give it a warm welcome. One might possibly say that, whereas £10 in 1972 is now worth only about £7.40.and that it might have been fairer if the bonus had been £12.50, which would have brought it up to approximately the same amount, I think that is taking rather a carping view of what is quite a generous gesture. I should finally like to join with both noble Lords in thanking the Post Office staff for undertaking the great amount of extra work they are going to do to make this bonus available to people at the appropriate time.

§ LORD WELLS-PESTELL
My Lords, I am grateful to both the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, for receiving this Bill in the way that they have. In answer to the, noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, the exclusion of some and the difficulties that that raises is a perfectly true observation. 707 I think it may well be—and here I am expressing a personal view—that we shall have to try to move towards more adequate and far better pensions for people in need of them for fifty-two weeks a year, rather than rely upon this bonus once a year. This is something which I think we shall have to look at, not only as a Government but as a nation. The noble Lord is quite right in saying that people will have to register a week earlier. About 1 million more people are being brought into the scheme, and this adds very considerably to the administration problems. Then, as some noble Lords will know, a large number of beef tokens will be issued in the very near future. I do not know the actual number, but that, too, will impose quite a strain upon the resources.
With regard to Gibraltar, I understand that Gibraltar is included because it comes within the terms of the European Economic Community, and we are obliged, as the noble Lord will know, to treat all who come within that Community in precisely the same manner. That is the explanation. As I say, my Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for receiving this Bill as well as they have, and I trust your Lordships will now give it a Second Reading.