Speeches by Bell.

“Broadly, most of that does not come through DWP, but there are some exceptions. In the previous Government, the roll-out of universal credit was tied to support for the actual claiming process. The Government support financial advice more broadly. You see that through MaPS, for which I am the responsible Minister. We s…”

“My experience is that, if local authorities feel that we are engaging with them, they want to get involved and support pensioners. I will take away what we should do about those that are less engaged. We have 200 and we have clear evidence that they have engaged. My honest view is that there are a lot of other good loc…”

“On your question, we monitor those that have actively engaged with the campaign, but in a collaborative fashion, not in a browbeating fashion. I think that 200 local authorities engaged over the course of the last year.”

“Laura, do you want to come in the household support fund evaluation before I answer that question?”

“I will offer some overall remarks and then I will come to Laura. We do monitor; there are evaluations of each round of the household support fund, and I have obviously read those. Those are so far covering household support fund under the previous Government. I will say two things. One is that what you are saying in he…”

“I agree with that. You can see that, for example, in how we try to encourage take-up of attendance allowance, targeting a different part of a similar population, and GPs and charities are a large part of what you need to see. In that case, the barrier is slightly harder because there is a recognition and understanding …”

“I think I understand the point. The evidence supports what you are saying, if you mean that, if you can get to someone and say to them, “It would be worth you applying for pension credit,” does that have an effect? I think the answer is yes, we do see that. That is exactly why we changed some of the marketing work over…”

“Just to be clear what we are saying here, I have certainly heard what you have said and we will definitely pass that on. I think the evidence is from about a decade ago. That is one of the reasons why we are carrying out the new evidence, but it was pretty conclusive that stigma per se was not the main barrier. That is…”

“That is a very good question. It is reasonable for people to say, “Why do I have to do this housing benefit claim and this pension credit claim separately?”. There is a good bit of analysis to quantify that for you, which is that there is 27% duplication or overlap between the two bits of information. The state is aski…”

“You do not need to fill the vast majority in if you do not need to.”

“There will always be some individuals of all age groups who have bits of that. You see that in working-age claimants all the time, people who have not had to rely on the social security system. As I am sure we all know, anyone who has a bad experience, a family break-up, ill health or an unemployment event, can suddenl…”

“A lot. It is too common in the media and other commentary to say that civil servants are doing a bad job, but I want to be clear that the civil service has done a brilliant job of processing pension credit claims over the course of the last year. They cannot often defend themselves, but they have done a brilliant job o…”

“I do not think that this is just because I am generally glass half full, but I think we have made—and by “we” I am not claiming the credit, because I have only been the Minister for Pensions since January and a lot of the work was done outside of Government—significant progress over the last year, as I say: record clai…”

“The entire point of the system, the literal added value of this bit of the system, is that it does respond to actual temperatures. It would be a completely different system. What you would be arguing for is a higher winter fuel payment. That is not an argument for a change to the cold weather payments.”

“I have not heard people saying that to me. People definitely do worry about turning on the heating because of the bills full stop, and that is all ages. If you look at the survey evidence on who is doing that, it is working-age families. Poor working-age families is where you see the highest prevalence of people not ha…”

“It is £25 every week that it is triggered. It is a different scheme in Scotland, I should say. Everything I have just said does not apply in Scotland. I think that there is a case for making that argument. I would say two things. One is the point I have made to you repeatedly, which is that everything sits within a con…”

“It is a valuable but relatively small part of the social security system. That is what it is. The spend this winter was probably around £35 million. There were about 33 triggers: remember, to be triggered we need average temperatures below zero for seven days. In other winters it has been more significant. It was not a…”

“Fine. We will come on to those. If I am honest, so does the state pension. What is the bedrock of Government support for pensioners, dwarfing everything else? It is the state pension, and then obviously pension credit for a significantly smaller proportion. That is the core of the offer. That is the core of our answer …”

“I think that is exactly the right way to think about it. We need to step back holistically and say, “How do we want to deal with the problem?”, which is that we would like energy bills to be less difficult, if I am honest, for everybody, but particularly for pensioners. By the way, why do we particularly think about pe…”

“Okay. You have tempted me enough to say something, John. This is not a comment about the winter fuel payment specifically. This is a comment about when you would want to think about tapering and not. At one level, from a theoretical perspective, tapering is generally desirable for avoiding cliff edges in the social sec…”