Blunkett rules out ending means-tested benefits

David Blunkett, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has ruled out scrapping means-tested retirement benefits. He said yesterday he supported the principle behind the controversial pensions credit system and believed a reform of the state system could be built around it.

Speaking before his first speech in his new role, Mr Blunkett told journalists the pensions credit had been effective as an immediate means of pulling pensioners out of poverty. But he said he wanted to prevent younger generations from getting into poverty, insisting these two aims were not incompatible.

"You do have to move quickly to get people out of poverty, and that's what pensions credit is about," Mr Blunkett said. "But we want to stop people getting into poverty in the first place. I don't want a society where we wait for people to fall into poverty and then somehow we benevolently dig them out of it. I don't think [these approaches] are mutually exclusive."

Mr Blunkett said he had met Adair Turner, the government-appointed pensions tsar, and was planning to reveal the first details of his department's policy ideas towards the end of next month. He said he would then take his ministerial team out to the regions to start a national debate on pensions.

Responding to criticism over the Government's decision to replace the work and pensions secretary for the sixth time since 1997, Mr Blunkett insisted that he was "enthused" about his new job. "I've long been interested in designing the future of the welfare state," he said.

He added that one of his aims would be to invoke a change in the way people regard the elderly, saying that the word "pensioner" was a description of income, "not a description of who they are as a person".

Later, Mr Blunkett told the National Association of Pension Funds conference, in Manchester, that he hoped to "establish a consensus that will provide the stability, certainty and fairness we all want to see in the pensions system."