I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments Nos. 6 and 70 to 84.

The amendments correct minor drafting difficulties in relation to clause 5 and commencement. Their aim is to amend various provisions of the Social Security Acts 1975 and 1986 to re-establish the accepted policy that, generally speaking, a person shall not be entitled to benefit for any period unless a claim has been made within the prescribed time limits.

The Under-Secretary of State may say that these are minor, technical amendments but, certainly in one case, they reflect an outrageous constitutional precedent. They are all major pieces of retrospective legislation. We are dealing with a swathe of retrospective legislation.

The amendments to clause 5 have a long history, going back to the McCarthy judgment in the House of Lords in November 1984. It established that a person could be entitled to a benefit, even if he or she had not claimed it. That meant that a claim could be made outside normal time limits. In 1985 the Government tried to prevent that by adding section 165A to the Social Security Act 1985, but last year a social security commissioner decided in the Cartwright case that section 165A did not operated retrospectively. In other words, it was still possible to make a late claim, at least for the period before September 1985, when section 165A came into force. Tonight, the Government are retrospectively preventing that from happening from now on.

The amendments to paragraph 7 of schedule 6 deal with important retrospective principles. Paragraph 7 deals with what arises when a social security commissioner, the High Court, the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords has decided that the Department of Social Security has got the law wrong. It is intended to ensure that other claimants in similar circumstances cannot claim arrears of benefit for the period before the decision of the commissioner or court.

Paragraph 7 was introduced on Report in the House in April 1990. It was not debated because of the guillotine. That takes us back to the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Morris) and others when we debated the timetable motion tonight. It is outrageous that we have so little time to debate a provision, which has been made even worse in the Lords, which we could not debate properly on Report because of the guillotine. The provision was amended in the Lords and the amendment almost completely rewrites the paragraph, which runs to two and a half pages of the Bill. We are debating paragraph 7 as a whole, not merely the points of detail.

Under paragraph 7, apart from the individual whose case is decided by the commissioner or the court, no one can claim the benefits to which they were legally entitled for the period before that decision. This is a major constitutional alteration, which denies thousands of claimants back payments of benefit. It is a complete reversal of the constitutional relationship between Parliament and the judiciary. Parliament makes laws and, if there are doubts, the courts, including social security commissioners, interpret laws. They decide not merely what the law means in future, but what it has meant since Parliament enacted it. Nobody, not even the Secretary of State, is entitled to substitute his or her interpretation for that of the courts. If the Secretary of State does not like what the courts decide, he can ask Parliament to change the law. Even then, the change would not normally be retrospective.

Paragraph 7 places every adjudication officer in a DSS office or unemployment benefit office above the highest court in the land. In effect, it says that the law means whatever the adjudicating authority thought it meant, even if the commissioner or the courts subsequently decide that it meant something entirely different.

Paragraph 7 raises practical implications. One category of claimants affected is the large number of disabled people who suffer from vibration white finger. I have considerable interest in the matter as thousands of my constituents have outstanding claims mainly as a result of working in shipyards, mines and heavy engineering. An important decision was made by the commissioners in respect of my constituent Mr. Kenneth Potts.

Thousands of people await review of claims for reduced earnings allowance. Provided that the review is carried out before this Bill receives Royal Assent, they will be entitled to 12 months' arrears from the date on which they applied for a review, but those whose cases are still in the pipeline will lose that entitlement. It is an utterly absurd, arbitrary guillotine. Apart from the fundamental objections to paragraph 7, it is plainly utterly unjust that its effect on individuals should depend entirely on the length of the administrative delay on applications for review.

In the same town, the backlog of reviews could be dealt with at a different pace in two different DSS offices. Those who claimed a review in one office considerably before someone who claimed a review at the other office could lose out simply because the administrative delay at one office is greater than at the other. To have these administrative delays on reviews is bad enough, but for the Government to compound that by bringing down an arbitrary guillotine on the procedure is outrageous.

The position of the Minister of State is somewhat peculiar and I hope that he will listen carefully. I pay tribute to him for listening to arguments about the particular problems that arise from vibration white finger and for laying an order last year. As a result of representations, he agreed to lift the order for a period which we welcomed. As a result, thousands more late claims were made by people who realised that they could claim as a result of the Potts decision. Thousands are now outstanding. The Minister has, in effect, cruelly lifted an order so that thousands more claims can be made, but now that those claims are registered and awaiting review, he has amended the Bill in the Lords so that, if the reviews are successful, they cannot be backdated.

When the amendments were debated in the Lords, Lord Henley defended them on the grounds that they gave effect to what the law was always intended to be. Who is to say what the law was intended to be? In the Crompton case, the commissioner, Mr. R. A. Saunders, commented:

"One cause of the problem is that the expression "non-dependant" in the provisions in question has been given what is on any view a completely artificial meaning. It seems to have nothing to do with dependency in the ordinary sense of the word."

The commissioner went on to say that he could see nothing in the wording of the regulation to suggest that it had the meaning attached to it by the DSS adjudication officer. Yet in Lord Henley's view, Parliament is now to be assumed to have intended it to have that meaning, although the commissioner has effectively said that that is nonsense.

The people who will be affected by the decision are those who were entitled to a severe disability premium in the light of the Crompton case. That decision was dated 17 May. A claimant who succeeds in getting his claim reviewed before Royal Assent will be entitled to arrears of premium, not for 12 months but at least for the period up to 9 October 1989 when the regulations were amended in anticipation of the commissioners' decision. If the claim is not reviewed before Royal Assent, the claimant will get nothing.

If from now on the law is to be not what Parliament enacts, but what the Government intend or the adjudication officer thinks was intended, what is the point of our coming here and debating these matters? The practical outcome of the amendment to paragraph 7 will be that if a number of claimants appeal on the same grounds, and the commissioner treats one of them as a test case and finds in favour of the claimant, only that one claimant will receive arrears of benefit. What an absurdity. I shall spell out the practicalities to Ministers and ask for a specific assurance.

Logically, if the Government persist in this nonsense, claimants will insist that massive joint cases are taken to the commissioners. Instead of the simplicity of one test case, each claimant will say, "I want my case decided by the commissioners." Will the Government say tonight, first, whether they accept that that is likely to be the position and, secondly, what administrative arrangements they will make so that, if necessary, hundreds or even thousands of claimants can simultaneously appeal to the commissioners for decisions when they believe that they have a common ground for claiming? That is the administrative nightmare into which the Government will have got themselves if they continue with this nonsense.

This group of amendments also involves retrospective legislation on industrial deafness. Last year, the arbitrary regulation put a five-year limit on claims for industrial deafness, which was found to be ultra vires. Tonight, the Government are retrospectively saying that, regardless of the commissioners' decision, from now on the law will retrospectively cut off those claims that people could make until tonight.

This is a swathe of retrospective legislation aimed at people with little power to fight back. It totally undermines the independence of the social security adjudication system. The precious little confidence that many people have in the system will be undermined even further. Many thousands of people in many districts, particularly those suffering from industrial vibration white finger, who thought that after a long struggle they were to obtain some rights, a fair review and a small entitlement as their just deserts, for whom orders had been laid, withdrawn and laid again, will now discover that they will not receive back payment. That is outrageous, and even at this stage the Government should think again.

As always, I congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland, North (Mr. Clay) on the force of his arguments and his intimate knowledge of the subject drawn from his constituents, particularly those suffering from vibration white finger.

In relation to amendments Nos. 5 and 6, the hon. Member for Sunderland, North is right when he quotes McCaffrey and Cartwright. A legal understanding on entitlement has existed through Administrations of both complexions at least back to the start of the national insurance scheme in 1948. He was right when he said that until a judgment of the House of Lords in November 1984, it had been our understanding that the law achieved such an effect on entitlement. In the McCaffrey case, their Lordships held that entitlement to benefit could exist even where no claim had been made. Although the McCaffrey judgment referred specifically to non-contributory invalidity pension, the decision had wider implications across the social security sphere. Therefore, we decided that the effects of the McCaffrey case should be nullified, and section 165A was inserted into the Social Security Act 1975 to achieve that, with effect from 2 September 1985.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the Cartwright case of June last year, when a social security commissioner held that the word "entitled", where relating to an event before 2 September 1985, meant "entitled" in the McCaffrey sense—without requiring that a claim must be made for benefit. I repeat that it has been the understanding of Governments of both complexions since 1948 that, in order to be entitled to benefit, a claimant should make a claim.

8.45 pm

The effect of the proposed change is to restore the law on entitlement to that which we had always thought it to be before the McCaffrey judgment, following the introduction of section 165A. Clearly, there must be a limit beyond which it is neither practicable nor consistent with the proper administration of public funds to have to investigate benefit entitlement. Until the McCaffrey judgment and the Cartwright decisions, the 12-month statutory time bar on claiming had always provided such a limit. All we aim to do now is to restore that position.

The hon. Member for Sunderland, North overstated his concern about amendments Nos. 70 to 84. I ask the House to agree with those amendments. There have been statutory restrictions on the payment of arrears since 1948. The amendments correct drafting defects in paragraph 7 of schedule 6 to provide that arrears of benefit payable on the review of a claim or on a new claim following a reinterpretation of the law by a higher appellate authority are restricted back to the date of that reinterpretation. The maximum amount of arrears payable for new claims is limited to the current absolute time limit for claiming the benefit at issue or, where there is not one, 12 months.

As the hon. Gentleman said, the present arrangements provide a 12-month limit on arrears, where adjudication officers review decisions in consequence of a reinterpretation of the law by a higher appellate authority. However, the hon. Gentleman must know that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration criticised that provision as inequitable because, where, following a reinterpretation of the law, an affected case does not come to light immediately, the claimant will effectively lose one week's arrears from every week's delay before a review decision is given.

It was in response to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration that we brought forward our amendments. We decided to introduce the arrangements provided by the amendments to give equity of treatment for all gainers from a reinterpretation of the law—by providing a common start date for payment of arrears—that the current backdating arrangements lack.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the Crompton case. I am aware of the concern about the effects of paragraph 7 on such cases affected by that decision. Anyone whose benefit is affected by that decision, and whose claim is reviewed before the introduction of paragraph 7 on Royal Assent, will have his or her benefit arrears calculated under the existing rules. Anyone whose case is reviewed after Royal Assent will have his benefit arrears limited back to the date of the social security commissioner's decision on Crompton.

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's concern about the amendments. Their purpose is to return the law to the position that Governments of both complexions believed it to be. We think that the proposals are fair, sensible and desirable. I commend them to the House.