Select committee: Work and Pensions Committee
Conclusion 35
2nd Report - Pensioner Poverty: challenges and mitigations
Published 24 Jul 2025
Addressed to Department for Work and Pensions
Work and Pensions Committee Pensioner Poverty: challenges and mitigations All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The reason the new State Pension was set above the Pension Credit Guarantee was to improve savings incentives. However, over the years more ‘passported benefits’ have become linked to it, meaning that being just a few pounds above Pension Credit level can now mean missing out on thousands of pounds of passported benefits. The decision to link the Winter Fuel Payment to Pension Credit shone a spotlight on this ‘cliff- edge’. Pensioners just above the threshold told us in strong terms that this was unfair, and organisations working with older people outlined severe hardship in this group. We heard that some form of taper could offer a solution, and that the planned merger of Pension Credit and Housing Benefit from 2026 was an opportunity to implement this. The Minister acknowledged 87 that a taper could reduce the sense of unfairness associated with the ‘cliff edge’, but identified other factors that would need to be considered, such as complexity and incentive effects. (Conclusion, Paragraph 174)
From: Work and Pensions Committee, 2nd Report - Pensioner Poverty: challenges and mitigations (HC 465), 24 July 2025
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 10 November 2025 (deadline 24 September 2025).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government's response commits to monitoring the gender pensions gap and to data-sharing reports to the Committee, but declines to monitor local authorities on benefit take-up or to change mixed-age couple conditionality.
- On the gender pensions gap, the government is "committed to monitoring" it and will "continue to seek to monitor and publish every 2 years", as the underlying survey data allow.
- On an Older People's Commissioner for England, the government says it "will consider" the experience and effectiveness of the Commissioner in Wales to inform its "future thinking in England".
- The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero "will write to the Committee by the end of 2025" with an assessment of the legislative changes needed to enable data sharing for bill support.
- On a Pension Credit taper, the government argues a taper "would introduce far greater complexity into the benefit". On mixed-age couples, it states there "are no plans to change or explore" the current requirement.