Speeches by Bell.

“The first thing I should say is that everything in this space matters a lot. It matters a lot to all of us because we are all aiming to have a retirement, it matters a lot that we have the certainty of planning for that, and we would all like to have as much life in retirement as possible. I am going to start on that, …”

“I think there is a wider question, which is probably more in the bigger labour market question. It is the traditional relationship between an employer and an employee. It is the value of retention of built-up skills. That is what is sitting behind a lot of our wish to ensure that we have this alignment of incentives be…”

“I will answer your question and then you can come in. Very exceptionally, the Conservative Opposition—and I am glad to say the Liberal Democrats as well—did not oppose the Bill, so it obviously has exceptional levels of cross-party support. It is a shame to see you changing your mind on that late in the game for some c…”

“I do not think we are going to use the power. I think the industry itself is saying that it is in savers’ interests for the UK pensions industry to look more similar to those in the rest of the world. They currently do not have a significant exposure to private assets. They think that for the same diversification reaso…”

“I think there is a lot more agreement on that challenge. We have all had constituents or even family members in those situations. That is why I was saying earlier that we need to think about the benefit system in the round. I am sure you will have had this in your surgeries as well, but you will have 55-year-olds in th…”

“I will make a bit of progress, and then I am sure I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman, who is always very enthusiastic. He did actually stand up on this occasion. That is what a learning curve looks like—it is a shame Conservative Front Benchers have not found one in 14 long years.”

“It is for the Lords. What I have always said to you is that there is only one purpose for this power. I know the Conservative party is enjoying deciding late in the day it does not support in its entirety a Bill it supported all the way through, but that is to do with the consistency of your own decision making. I have…”

“I thank the hon. Member for his question and his invitation to discuss some hypotheticals. I would just point out that it is only next week that the policy of extending the 5p freeze comes into effect. Fuel duty will be frozen until the end of August this year. That is the position as it is. I will turn later to how we…”

“The decision to increase it was obviously taken by the last Government, and the acceleration of it was also put in place by the last Government, so you will have to ask them who they spoke to at the time. They did publish an impact assessment along with the 2014 Act, but it is not for me to talk about. There are other …”

“Those issues are considered inside the Department. I can speak for what we will be doing as a Government, which is that the Secretary of State, in carrying out his SPA review, will be focused on that. Rightly, he asks me those kinds of questions all the time about what it means for different people and again, that is a…”

“Absolutely not. You should definitely not mislead members of the public about the very strong incentive that exists to save for their pension, because it is on all of us to provide that trust in the system. There is a very strong tax incentive to save for our pension. It is very important that all public representative…”

“I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add: “recognises that, at the Autumn Budget 2025, the Government extended the five pence per litre fuel duty cut for five months and cancelled the inflation linked increase for 2026-27; welcomes that Fuel Finder helps consumers compare…”

“I completely agree with the hon. Member that families up and down the country are worried about what they are seeing on their TV screens about the conflict in the middle east—maybe because they know people directly, but also much more universally about the effect on all of us and on their budgets—and they expect a Gove…”

“On the Mayfield review specifically?”

“It is. Most of that is in the short term. I am focusing on the work we have talked about before in terms of the interaction between housing benefit and pension credit. That is our focus at the moment, but there will be lots of other things where that can be relevant that I will be happy to talk to the Committee about. …”

“I am not standing by anything the Conservative Government did in 2011 or that the Lib Dems supported them in doing. As I said, I opposed the acceleration of the state pension age at the time because it was done with too little notice and with too little thought. I will answer for what we all do, which is to take very s…”

“I will give you my lessons from that and then you can go hunting for ex-Ministers to ask them what they did and did not think back in 2023. The lessons are that notice is really important, quality of communications is really important, and quality of what the state is doing on the health and employment support side are…”

“That is a really important question. We must balance two things here: certainty for people and responsiveness to the world data. The legislation requires the SPA reviews to happen reasonably regularly. Since the 2014 Act that made the last set of decisions there have been two independent SPA reviews, and the last Gover…”

“There definitely are, I absolutely agree with that, and you mentioned some of them. It is also true that you see big differences in ethnicity. In general, you see lower life expectancy for white households, quite significantly in some cases. We obviously do look at that and that is considered in both the decisions and …”

“It is not the tone. I don’t think if you focused on the question really seriously, you would have chosen to make an acceleration with less than five years’ notice. I do not think that is a choice people would have made. That is abstracting from your wider point, which is about the right level in the longer term. Are th…”