Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Debate between Baroness Wheatcroft and Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick

Report stage
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I would first like to apologise to your Lordships’ House for being unable to speak on the Bill at Second Reading and in Committee due to direct participation in Select Committee work. I am very pleased to follow my noble friend Lady Lister and to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, on bringing forward these cross-party amendments.

Although we in Northern Ireland make our own social security legislation, in all instances it replicates legislation here because the money comes from here. I look across the Chamber at the noble Lord, Lord Dodds; he and I were former Ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive with responsibility for pensions and all social security matters. We may have had the flexibility to bring in slight amendments, but we had to adhere strictly to the principles and policies because of the issue of parity.

I am pleased to support these amendments because, like my noble friend Lady Lister, I believe that pensioner poverty is deepening. In Northern Ireland, I see it day in, day out; people—particularly pensioners, many of whom have paid in over their lifetime’s work through national insurance contributions and tax—now find themselves reliant on the use of food banks. To say the least, the pandemic has worsened their situation; it has made mental illnesses more acute and people are unwell, and they also have less money for important items such as foodstuffs, which they require to survive.

I support these amendments because they are important for protecting pensioners, including the poorest, in line with an earnings figure that is adjusted for pandemic distortions. Protecting women and those who are the poorest in our society should be a mandatory obligation on all of us. There is a duty of responsibility to reject the proposal to remove the triple lock pension system. I say to the Minister and the Government Front Bench that this decision will impact most on those women who find themselves in the greatest level of poverty, who have already been subject to their entitlement to a pension dropping from the age of 60 to the age of probably 66 or 67, as per the Pensions Act 1995 of this Parliament.

I am therefore very happy to support these important amendments. There is a duty of integrity to protect all parties’ manifesto commitments and to amend the uprating Bill to ensure that all pensioners—people who have provided for all of us—are duly protected in the best financial way.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, I put my name to these two amendments for all the reasons that have just been outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and others who have spoken. It seems absolutely the right thing to do, on behalf of 12 million pensioners, to ask the other place to think again, after it spent just two and a half hours considering how to penalise 12 million people in this country.

It is only right that the link to earnings which was part of the manifesto promises should be preserved. In 1979, the Government of Margaret Thatcher abandoned that link. It was restored again in 2011, but the effects live on and, today, pensions are still below their relationship to earnings in 1979. The argument that this is a one-off does not hold water.

I will not repeat the argument that I used in the first group of amendments, save to say that this is not the time when we should make our pensioners poorer; when we can afford, apparently, to make bankers richer, and enable them to drink more champagne as they fly on short-haul flights in the UK, we really need to think again about whether pensioners should be made poorer. Make no mistake about it: the way inflation is headed, pensioners will be poorer.

The Minister talked about the CPI, but she was looking backwards. It is no good telling pensioners what prices have been; when we are talking about the money they will get in the future, the conversation needs to relate to where prices are going. Prices are going up much faster than the rate by which we are talking about raising pensioner income. For those reasons, it is absolutely right that this House should ask the other place to think again.