Commonwealth Countries: Reciprocal Pension Agreements

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Monday 1st March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

As I have already said, the Government intend to respond to the Canadian Government shortly. We are committed to ensuring that older people can live with the dignity and respect they deserve. The state pension is the foundation of support for them.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, what consideration are Her Majesty’s Government giving to unfreezing the state pensions of the 230,000 Britons who have moved to Australia to take into account rises they would have received in their state pensions if they were still living in the UK? Some now receive only £48.75 per week, despite having made national insurance contributions in the UK throughout their working lives.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

As I understand it, the previous agreement with Australia, which did not include uprating, was terminated by Australia in 2001 due to the UK’s refusal to change its policy on pensions uprating abroad.

Automatic Enrolment (Earnings Trigger and Qualifying Earnings Band) Order 2021

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister introduced this debate very clearly, and we have had some excellent contributions from Members. I support the order. I have always thought it important that we encourage people to save for their retirement with a pension. The younger you are when you start this pot, the more you have to support yourself as you get older. The introduction of automatic enrolment for pensions was a positive step in this direction, and the massive increase in uptake since it was introduced reflects this.

However, I worry that, in the current climate, this may be a strain too far for businesses, as they struggle under the financial pressure of closing their doors to trade, in part or in full. While the furlough scheme helps with salaries, it does nothing to assist with pensions and national insurance contributions. It is costing all these businesses money to stay closed—from the Richard Ward beauty salon chain racking up debts of £1,000 a day to the likes of the Leon takeaway restaurant losing up to £200,000 a week, rising to £800,000 if you take account of the profit it would usually make.

Pension costs are part of this equation, and even the changes made by this order will trigger an additional group now falling into automatic enrolment, the costs of which will add to employers’ financial worries. I ask the Minister to work with the Chancellor to look at ways of helping these businesses to survive by reducing these costs in the short term.

Mesothelioma Lump Sum Payments (Conditions and Amounts) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I wish to voice my support for the Government in the financial assistance they continue to offer people who have been diagnosed with these terrible diseases. I appreciate that no amount of money can compensate for these life-debilitating diseases, which often lie on the lungs or in the body for years before detection. However, it can help them and their families. Given the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, particularly on the lives and the longevity of those with these diseases, could the Government look at whether there is anything more they can offer to them, be it additional funding, priority vaccines or some other new developments?

Pension Scams

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I say to the noble Lord that the Government must look into these matters. It is a great concern that people from BAME communities should be disadvantaged in such a way, and we will certainly do that.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, most of the people who I meet who have suffered badly from these scams are, surprisingly, older people who have always been efficient and capable at dealing with their own affairs. Is there any way that the Government can keep these people up to date so that they know to avoid the scams that are currently around?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

It is a great tragedy that these scammers are so clever and such ruthless people. The Government passed legislation in 2015 making it a requirement that all people take advice, and we have banned cold calling, but there is a recognised need for more action to address this issue. It is important that people take advice from the Money and Pensions Service but I am sure that in the Project Bloom activity more communication will come out to people. I hope that this will help.

Poverty and Disadvantage

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, this is a most important subject and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on introducing it to us today. It is also an extremely difficult problem, because it is so hard to find any real answer to it.

I have never lived in poverty, but my father came from a very poor family. He was the son of Irish migrants to Australia in 1860, and got educated by accident because some rich boy in the town had his education paid for and refused to go, so that family handed it on to my father’s family. He had to carry his shoes to school before that, as he could not afford to wear them, but that convinced him that the real way to make something out of life was education, which was the key to everything. If you were to be at all worthy of your place in society because you had developed some way of making a living, that would help. I strongly support what has been said about education today. My father went on to be a Member of Parliament and introduce child endowment, as the only other Minister for Health and Motherhood in the world in the 1920s, in the Storey Government. We call that child benefit here. He did that because he had a large number of children himself and saw how hard it was to bring them up.

After his death, instead of finding myself penniless, my dental degree—each of the family had some degree—meant that I had a way of earning a living. The surgery we had here was in a very poor part of east London, but it had a tremendous community. All the buildings were red brick, 200 years old and suffering subsidence—in the surgery, the door dropped about a foot between one side and the other—and eventually it was all redeveloped. But that community spirit really helped tremendously, because people cared about their neighbours: doors were usually just open and people sat in the sunshine in the doorways. When women came round for dental treatment, they were usually in slippers and hair curlers; men came round when they could, after whatever job they had been doing. We have lost a huge amount of that community spirit and that habit of helping one another. It should not require something like the Grenfell fire to bring communities back together again. That is a very important feature too.

Individuals are also important. I remember one family in particular, with three boys. The mother cleaned offices, while the father was a bit of a drinker and not much use for anything. The three boys went to the local school and were also patients of ours. One boy never achieved anything much in life. The second used to come in at the age of 10 with a dummy in his mouth, and if they took it out they had to hurriedly put it back in again, because the flow of language was so bad. As for the third boy, the schoolteacher called the parents in and said, “This boy is clever and should go to a grammar school”, which he did. He had a future and has done so much in life.

There are opportunities. Youth organisations bring people out of the really awful backgrounds from which they are suffering. We should also outlaw the immoral loans that people can accumulate at a huge loss in no time without even being aware of it.

Pensions: British Citizens Overseas

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

Is the Minister able to tell us how many countries pay from their own funds? For example, I understand that Australia ups the pension of anyone from the UK living in Australia, and the Australian people pay whatever would have been the extra. I think the same thing applies in the United States. Can she tell us how many countries adopt that policy and also say whether there has been any estimate of what it would cost if all those pensioners living overseas came back and used everything here instead of abroad?

[Baroness Altmann]

My noble friend referred to Australia, which is an interesting example of one of the potential issues with uprating. The Australian pension system is means tested. Therefore, the estimate is that over 25% of any payment made to uprate overseas state pensions in Australia would merely go to the Australian Treasury.

Housing Benefit: Social Housing Units

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I am afraid there were a lot of inaccurate figures there. Under the last Labour Government, the number of social and affordable rented houses fell by 420,000. Since 2010, it has gone up by 46,000. We have just seen the expenditure come down, because we have got people into work: people in work do not require support from housing benefit, and their numbers have come down. The numbers in the social rented sector are down 2% in the last year and the numbers in the private rented sector are down 5%. The figures that the noble Baroness was promoting are really quite wrong.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

Is the Minister aware that there are abuses in the system through which private landlords let properties to people who need them very badly? In the past, there was a ridiculous situation whereby, if you were prepared to let your property for £X, the council would tell you that you could get £2X for it, so immediately any sensible landlord charged £2X. Is he also aware that other people required their tenants who were getting housing benefit to pay extra to them as private landlords and to say nothing about it? Something has to be done to ensure that that does not continue.

[Lord Freud]

We inherited a system under the local housing allowance which was based at 50% of the average rate. Clearly, that was too high and encouraged some landlords to move up to that central rate, even though their houses were not worth that amount. We have now put a series of controls on how the LHA works.

Social Housing Sector

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I thank the noble Lord for that question, because I absolutely understand the substantial distinction between standard provision of housing and supported housing, which in the context of the actual payments is now specified allowances.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

For the purposes of clarification, can the Minister confirm exactly what is supported housing and clarify that it in no way involves aids for disabled people in housing of any variety?

[Lord Freud]

This is a variegated sector, which is exactly what we are discovering now. Supported accommodation or specified accommodation, using the other definition, effectively looks at the services that are provided to support people. I suspect that some of them will supply aids of some kind, but the real thing is the actual service elements that are provided for people.

Personal Independence Payment

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I think the judge very much took on board the fact that the Secretary of State realised that something that was simply unacceptable was going on and that we took very large measures to deal with it. Those measures included ramping up the numbers—we ramped up the number of health officials by a factor of four—and we had many more places to do the assessments, and so on. That is what has got the situation under control.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that a great deal of time is taken to reassess the cases of people who have incurable and irreversible conditions? Would it not be of great benefit to the department for those people not to be reviewed so often?

[Lord Freud]

My noble friend makes a fair point. Indeed, one of the ways in which we have speeded up the process since last June is by making more paper assessments, and it is precisely that group of people for whom we are able to do that.

Pensions: British Pensioners Overseas

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

This policy has been running now for 60 years. It has been upheld in the European Court of Human Rights. We have made pensions available to many pensioners abroad, which is different from many OECD countries which do not do so. Most pensioners migrated well before they became pensioners and have built up rights in their adopted countries.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, your Lordships will not be surprised that, with my Australian origins, I have been approached many times about this, and successive Government after successive Government have given me exactly the same reply over the 30 years that I have been asking this question—that it simply cannot be afforded. But when I followed this up at the Australian end, I was assured that they top the pensions up, or did so. Does my noble friend know whether it stills happens that a number of the Commonwealth countries take on and give the extra pension?

[Lord Freud]

This is the reason why this is a complicated area: it is about a bilateral agreement with another country. In practice, to take the example of Australia, I estimate that for any extra amount that we paid to ex-UK pensioners or UK pensioners living in Australia, more than 25% of that money would go straight into the Australian Treasury.