Covid-19: Over-60s
Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Bryan of Partick
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the advice by the World Health Organization that people over 60 should be treated as vulnerable to COVID-19, what plans they have to support people in this age group during the COVID-19 pandemic who must work because they do not have access to a pension.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Stedman-Scott) (Con)
My Lords, people over 60 are not automatically considered to be either clinically vulnerable or clinically extremely vulnerable, as those categories are based on specific clinical circumstances. Employers have a duty of care towards their workers and should ensure that appropriate steps are taken to mitigate health and safety risks in the workplace. For those who are unemployed, we have announced a comprehensive jobs package to build on the existing Jobcentre Plus support.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab) [V]
I thank the Minister for her reply. Is she aware that healthy life expectancy for women in Glasgow is 58 years and six months, but many women in poor health have to continue to work because they still have years to wait for their state pension? Some 80% of key workers in education, health and social care are women, and these occupational groups are among those at the highest risk of Covid-19. Approximately 32% of these women are over 60. Can the Minister explain why the Government cannot give them early access to their state pension?
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
First, I want to say how we value the work that front-line workers do and how much of a debt we owe to them. The Government are not considering granting early access to the state pension; I am unable to say more than that.
Pension Schemes Bill [HL]
Baroness Bryan of Partick ExcerptsTuesday 28th January 2020
(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, I think I can claim to be the most intimidated speaker in having to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who spoke for eight minutes without a note in front of her. I will proceed to read my contribution.
Although I welcome some of the Bill’s aspects, like other noble Lords, I am sorry that the opportunity to address some outstanding concerns around pensions has not been taken. I want to keep some of them on the agenda by raising them today. The Bill could have introduced controls on the level of profits that pension companies can make from annuities schemes. Secondly, as has been mentioned, it could have addressed the stark problem of gender inequality in pension provision. Lastly, it could have included provision for women born in the 1950s whose pension rights were hit so hard by the rush to equalise the retirement age: the WASPI women.
First, I congratulate the Communication Workers Union on its campaign, which resulted in Part 1 of the Bill enabling collective defined contribution—CDC—pension schemes. It has been said by many speakers that although CDC schemes do not provide all the certainties of defined benefits, they are in many ways preferable to defined contribution schemes. I also congratulate the Fire Brigades Union on its successful challenge to the discrimination against its younger members, who were not given the same conditions in their pension scheme as older members. These two examples demonstrate the importance of the collective strength that comes from the trade union movement.
As others have done, I declare an interest as someone who receives a pension through a defined benefit scheme. Like others, I looked on in horror as friends and family members were transferred to defined contributions schemes with all their uncertainties, particularly in purchasing lifetime annuities.
Patrick Collinson wrote this in the Guardian last year:
“Annuities have turned out to be fabulously profitable for Britain’s pension companies – and something of a disaster for many of those forced into them”.
He explained that the pension companies based their annuity rates on projections of how long people were likely to survive—but they got their projections wrong. It turns out that we are not living as long as they expected. Actuaries have now reduced the life expectancy rate, making it 13 months lower than they predicted in 2015. The money set aside for those pensions has been released—however, to be paid not to the pensioners who built up that fund but to the shareholders of the pension companies. The amount released is already more than £1 billion and is likely to be £4 billion over the next seven years. The Bill could have improved the regulation of these annuities to ensure that pensioners who have saved so hard are not overcharged and that, where there is excess, it is paid to pensioners rather than distributed to shareholders. We must always remember that pensions are deferred wages, not a gift or an unearned benefit.
I know that the Minister has rather a lot to do today but I hope that she will take the time to reassure the House that there are no plans to increase the retirement age. The suggestion by a previous Secretary of State for Work and Pensions that the state pension age could be increased to 75 is outrageous, particularly as we are now seeing an end to the rise in life expectancy and its reduction for people on lower incomes. The life expectancy for men in Glasgow is in the low 70s, but even in areas with higher life expectancy, it is a cruel prospect for people in their later years. I do not believe that anyone proposing further increases in the retirement age really expects people to work until they are 75. They simply want to reduce the number of years that people will be entitled to the state pension. Instead, people would have to face their old age as benefit claimants or through scraping by on a workplace pension. Any further increase would mean that more people would die without ever receiving a penny of the state pension that they had contributed to throughout their working lives.
Pension contributions based on earnings will inevitably favour men as long as we have a gender pay gap. As my noble friend Lady Drake pointed out, women are far more likely to take time off work or work part-time while caring for children or elderly or sick relatives, and they usually cannot recover those missed contributions. The pay gap is a disadvantage to women throughout their working years and continues into retirement, making a substantial difference to their final pension. It is not surprising that women of all ages are more likely to opt out of auto-enrolment than men.
The treatment of the WASPI women is also likely to make all women more sceptical about pensions. I imagine that Ministers blush when they talk about the importance of pensioners being able to predict their income in later life or their aim to build greater trust in schemes. This is what the WASPI women expected and trusted in from their state pensions. They thought that they could predict their pensions but suddenly found that their circumstances had been changed without giving them enough time to make adequate alternative provision. Is there any possibility of the Government making an act of good faith to the women who were misled over their pension entitlement? Legal avenues are still being pursued against the Government, whose own lawyer had to fall back on the defence that
“legislation carries with it no duty of fairness to the public.”
Following what appears to be an admission that their treatment of these women was unfair, I hope that the Government will feel honour-bound to do the right thing and give the WASPI women the compensation that they are entitled to.
Extreme Poverty and Human Rights: United Nations Report
Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, nobody wants to see poverty rising and we treat the issues raised by the special rapporteur seriously. However, we seriously regret the inflammatory and overtly political tone of his report and strongly refute the suggestion that we have failed to listen to stakeholders. As set out in our published response, we have taken action in a number of areas, including the recently announced reduction in the maximum duration for a single sanction from three years to six months.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, the rapporteur drew specific attention to the plight of women born in the 1950s, who have been particularly impacted by the “abrupt and poorly” phased in change to the pension age. Does the Minister accept that these women should be compensated for the loss they have experienced?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I believe in equality. Some of the rapporteur’s recommendations show a rather myopic understanding of universal credit. When I broached the subject of this report while representing Her Majesty’s Government at the UN last week, it was clear that everyone who knew about it was keen to distance themselves from it, preferring to compliment this Government on, “Groundbreaking, exemplary and world-leading policies in the area of work and pensions.”
Retirement Age: Women
Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Bryan of Partick
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how much in additional contributions has been paid into the National Insurance Fund as a result of the extension of the retirement age for women born in the 1950s.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Buscombe) (Con)
My Lords, I can confirm that between October 2017 and September 2018 there were 1.4 million women aged 60 and over employed in the UK. However, I am unable to say how this equates to national insurance contributions. This is because some women may earn under the primary threshold and therefore not pay national insurance contributions and, conversely, others may choose to pay voluntary national insurance contributions but are not working.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
I thank the Minister for that Answer. When the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer accelerated the equalisation of the state pension age for women he congratulated himself by saying:
“I’ve found it one of the less controversial things we’ve done and probably saved more money than anything else we’ve done”.
I assume he had a rough idea of what he was going to get in. It was less controversial because at that point the women who would be affected had not actually been told and the WASPI campaign had not got off the ground. Does the Minister think it is fair that these women, many of whom sacrificed their pension rights to bring up families and who are often excluded from workplace pensions, should be making a disproportionate contribution to reducing the deficit while those who helped cause it got off scot free?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, since 1995, successive Governments, including the Government of the party opposite, have gone to significant lengths to communicate these changes using a range of formats, communication methods and styles, including communication campaigns, leaflets and information online. But it is also important to emphasise that there is no link between the balance of the National Insurance Fund and the decision to introduce changes to the state pension age. Changes to the state pension age have been introduced by successive Governments since 1995 to address a long-standing inequality in the state pension age.
Benefits: Reductions
Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bassam for raising this important and timely issue for debate. I joined this House too late to actually know Patricia, but her work was well known outside this House and very much appreciated.
The debate is particularly timely for me because universal credit was rolled out in my own local area of Partick in Glasgow just yesterday: yes, frighteningly on Halloween. After the horror stories about how the introduction has gone elsewhere—it was not scaremongering—many people have been dreading this moment. Thanks to devolution in Scotland, there have been some mitigations. For example, claimants can choose to have their benefit paid twice a month, rather than monthly, and they can opt to have their housing element paid directly to their landlord. Will the Minister consider the benefits of adopting similar policies? However, as universal credit is a reserved issue, most of the problems identified can affect people in Scotland as much as anywhere else.
Many parents are aware than the transfer can be chaotic. The Resolution Foundation reports that 20% of new claims are not being paid on time or in full. I am sure that the Minister would agree that the financial impact of mistakes during the transfer should be borne by the Government rather than the individuals affected by it. Most analysis has shown that, overall, universal credit is less generous than the benefits it replaces. There is a consensus that the impact on children’s health and well-being, educational attainment and life chances is considerable.
I very much appreciated the briefing papers from the House of Lords Library and the Children’s Commissioner. Both those pieces of independent research paint a dismal picture of the impact this process has had; as we know, the cuts in benefits experienced by many families are not confined to those on universal credit but have been felt across the whole benefit system. In fact, it feels as though there has been a tidal wave of attacks on family life. As has been mentioned, these include the bedroom tax; the reduction and removal of the family element for in-work benefits; the pernicious two-child limit with its special circumstances clause, which is commonly called the rape clause; and the sanctions system, which has had such a damaging impact on claimants’ morale and self-esteem, often leaving them at the lowest ebb in their lives and sometimes even suicidal.
The Child Poverty Action Group has pointed out that this week’s Budget was a missed opportunity. It stated:
“This should have been the Budget to bring families in from the cold”.
As my noble friend Lord Bassam said, child benefit has lost 23% of its real value since 2010. The CPAG states:
“If there is substance to the claim that austerity is ending, ending the freeze and allowing family benefits to rise again with rents and inflation must be a priority”.
The result of these ongoing cuts is that we live in a society where poverty rates among children are higher than in any other group. Unfortunately, some politicians focus so much on the bottom line that they can forget that these are real families and real children. In justifying the two-child limit recently, a Member of the Scottish Parliament said:
“It is fair that people on benefits cannot have as many children as they like”,
while those in work “have to make decisions” on this. It must have slipped her mind that most people on benefits are in work, but regardless I do not believe that even the most hard-hearted would justify pushing a family into poverty because a couple who thought they were financially secure enough to have a third child found that their circumstances had changed, or believe that someone with an unplanned pregnancy should have to choose between an abortion or hardship for their family, or that a woman who had been raped or is in an abusive relationship should have to justify herself to the DWP. I am sure that noble Lords agree that we forget the reality of people’s lives at our peril.