I regularly meet national pensioners’ organisations, which seek to reflect the views of pensioners from East Anglia and other parts of the country. I hope to visit Norwich in the next few months and I intend to meet a pensioners’ group there.
I thank the hon. and learned Gentleman for that reply, but is he aware that the number of pensioners living in households earning less than 40 per cent. of the national average income is rising to a figure of nearly 500,000? Is he aware, more particularly, that pensioners in East Anglia have been hit especially hard by council tax increases—so much so that many pensioner households are now spending a very large percentage of their income on council tax bills? What plans does the Minister have to help those pensioners who just miss out on council tax rebate to get some respite?
I would hesitate, if I were a Conservative, to complain about pensions, given that under the Conservative Government the poorest pensioners were forced to exist on only £69 a week—barely enough, one would have thought, to pay for a bottle at the Bullingdon club. We have done an awful lot to help pensioners, and the number of pensioners living in relative poverty has fallen by more than 1 million since 1997. Just before Christmas, I announced some new proposals to help large numbers of pensioners who are not claiming pension credit or, indeed, the help that they need with council tax at the moment. When these proposals come into effect next year, we will mount a campaign to encourage pensioners to apply for help with council tax, which will automatically bring them some of the other benefits to assist them more widely. Pensioners’ organisations asked for that, and they have broadly welcomed it.
Will the Minister look again into the disadvantage suffered by people who reach retirement age, but are in receipt of a carer’s allowance and are caring for their loved ones? By what logic are they penalised or disadvantaged, particularly bearing in mind the fact that some devolved Assemblies in the UK are about to consider unilaterally remedying that wrong?
I looked into this problem recently, as some carers raised it with me. The benefits system does not allow for double payments. We are looking into ways of helping pensioners better to deal with some of the problems that they face. There are anomalies whereby someone living in an area receives help while the person living next door does not—and these are a matter of concern to us. I do not have an easy answer for my hon. Friend now, but I recognise the nature of the problem. It is an expensive problem to resolve, but we are still looking into ways of doing so.