Officials search Whitehall for rest of Iain Duncan Smith's pensions speech to Age UK conference #af11

by Simon Bottery, Director of Fundraising, Policy and Communications

Officials are hunting all over Whitehall for the second half of Iain Duncan Smith's speech on pensions to the Age UK conference yesterday. The Work and Pensions Secretary was supposed to announce a £140 flat rate pension, heavily trailed in that morning's media. But after a promising opening to the speech, the minister simply called for an open debate on pensions reform and sat down. It is now believed that the second half of the speech was blown out of an open taxi window on the way to the conference, or was eaten by the dog, or spontaneously combusted - no one is quite sure.

Sceptics have raised other, unrealistic possibilities for the missing content. Some have said that it was spiked by the Treasury, which still isn't convinced that the proposal will cost nothing (you can see where they're coming from - administration savings are somehow supposed to pay for a 40% increase for most pensioners and a 10% increase for those currently getting the pension credit top up). Others suggest that the Chancellor loves the idea but wants to have a share of the announcement of it.

A shame. As IDS said in the half of the speech he was able to deliver, the current system is so complex that no one knows what they are going to get, which hardly encourages retirement planning. And since a third of those eligible for pension credit don't claim it, the system allows hundreds of thousands of older people to live in poverty needlessly. So the time for reform is long overdue. Looks like we may have to wait just a little longer for that speech to be found before we can see what type of reform the coalition intends.