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Clause 32—(Increase Of Superannuation And Additional Allowances In Cases Of Retirement For Ill-Health With Less Than Twenty Years' Service)

Volume 465: debated on Tuesday 31 May 1949

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I beg to move, in page 26, line 4, to leave out subsection (3), and to insert:

"(3) The provisions of this section shall apply and shall be deemed always to have applied to persons who retired from the Civil Service at any time after the third day of December nineteen hundred and forty-eight, and to persons who so retired on or before that date and are living at the passing of this Act, and superannuation allowances and additional allowances granted before the passing of this Act may be increased accordingly; but nothing in this subsection shall authorise the payment, in respect of any period before the passing of this Act of any increase in the superannuation allowance of a person who retired as aforesaid on or before the said third day of December."
The Clause as it now stands permits those who retired on grounds of ill-health after 3rd December, 1948, with more than 10 years' but less than 20 years' reckonable pension, to be assessed for pension as if 20 years' service had in fact been given. My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Mr. C. Smith) moved an Amendment in Standing Committee and asked that this concession should be applied to those who had already retired on 3rd December, 1948, as from some current date. The Amendment now proposed accedes to his request.

The concession will be generally welcomed. It extends to persons who have already retired, the benefit of getting at least one quarter of their retiring salary by way of pension in the same way that the original Bill proposed for persons retiring from the Civil Service after the passage of the Bill. I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman, since he opposed a number of proposals of this character during the Committee stage on the ground that they would be expensive and costly to the Exchequer, to tell us the estimated cost of the concession now being made.

I wish to thank my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary for the concession which he is making. I associate myself with the question which has just been asked of him, and I should also like to ask the number of people likely to be affected by the concession.

I support what was said by my right hon. Friend, and I also should like to make how many people the concession will affect. Obviously he must have had that information in Standing Committee or he could not have rejected the proposal. The fact that he has changed his mind may be connected with the number of people as well as with the cost, and it is a matter in which most of us would be interested, especially those of us who have a large number of pensioners in our constituencies.

The hon. Gentleman is wrong in one particular. I did not reject the Amendment. I undertook to have it considered between the Committ stage and the Report stage. We have considered it, and my right hon. and learned Friend has been glad to accede to the request made by my hon. Friend and other hon. Friends behind me. The cost of the concession will be negligible. I do not know exactly what the number affected will be, but we shall obviously know in due course. We felt that the number would not be great and that it would be a waste of time to make an inquiry. We shall have to collect the information and get into touch with the people if the Amendment be accepted.

4.15 p.m.

I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman if I inadvertently used the word "reject" when I should have used the word "consider." It does rather strengthen our case. If it was a matter of rejection, the right hon. Gentleman has gone further than if it were a matter of consideration, when he would be doing obviously what he promised the Committee. Another matter to which I would draw attention is that not very long since, the Treasury always gave some sort of estimate of cost before advising the Committee to accept or reject an Amendment. I would point out, not in a hostile way, that the right hon. Gentleman has been unable to give the estimates called for and that therefore the Treasury are not so efficient as they used to be.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.