Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will make an assessment of the potential (a) merits, (b) impact on pension saving and (c) impact on encouraging the economically inactive to return to work of excluding occupational pensions from the assessment of means tested employment benefits.

It is entirely appropriate that means-tested benefits take account of occupational pension income. A guiding principle for means-tested benefits is that they are not paid to people who have sufficient other income available to meet the same need. However, this is normally only done where a person has reached the retirement age for the scheme in question. This enables the applicant to maximise their occupational pension in retirement and should not de-incentivise people with health conditions from taking steps to return to work.