State Pension: Women born in the 1950s

Debate between Chris Stephens and Patricia Gibson

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson]

I will make some progress.

The WASPI women’s situation is doubly unjust because they are a group who have faced pay discrimination throughout their working lives. They have been paid less, acknowledged less and valued less. Now, when they should be enjoying retirement, they are expected to sit quietly and simply accept the loss of their well-deserved and much-needed state pension. This is not pin money; it is money to pay the rent, buy food, do the shopping and pay the bills. How is that decent, by any measure? It is an absolute disgrace.

The Minister really must have a brass neck if he thinks he can talk his way out of this. The UK Government’s lack of engagement on the issue has been breathtaking in its arrogance. These women know that many of the hardest hit among their number have been driven to self-harm and suicide. Of 873 respondents to research undertaken for the BackTo60 campaign group by the charity SOS Silence of Suicide, almost half had self-harmed because of the stress and hardship caused by this pension reform, while 46% reported having suicidal thoughts as a direct result, and 70 women had attempted to take their own lives. All the while, the UK Government wring their hands and stutter about people living longer.

Such is the Government’s intransigence that these women have been forced to go to court. BackTo60 has launched a judicial review to force the Government to reverse their decision. The argument will be made by Michael Mansfield QC that the pension policy implemented by successive Governments is a gross injustice and is discriminatory, even though the delay in paying out the pensions is in the name of equality—there’s a wee irony for you. Law professor Jackie Jones has argued that the UK is in breach of its international treaty obligations. The demand for what is right—fair transitional arrangements for these women—will not be silenced.

Inconveniently for the Government, the former Pensions Minister, Steven Webb, has conceded that not enough was done to inform and prepare these women for the changes. The Select Committee on Work and Pensions concluded that

“more could and should have been done”

to communicate the changes. It seems that a mess was made of the acceleration of the changes in the Pensions Act 2011, but the only people to pay the price for that mess are the women involved.

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

Many women, including constituents of mine at the Blackfriars pub in Glasgow, are watching this debate and listening to my hon. Friend’s excellent speech. Does she agree that the mythical letters that the Department for Work and Pensions was supposed to send to so many women to tell them that their pensions were changing were so elusive that there was a better chance of finding a golden ticket in a Wonka bar than of getting one?

[Patricia Gibson]

Indeed. I am sure that the WASPI women are gratified to hear the support in this Chamber for their cause and their quest for justice.

Let me turn, before the Minister does, to the well-worn phrases and half-hearted justifications that may well form part of his reply. Let me be clear: this debate is not about the age at which people should retire, nor is it about how we are all living longer. It is about successive UK Governments not communicating significant changes in the women’s pension age, and about the political choice not to address that in order to save money. It is about how expendable women born in the 1950s are to this Government. The fact is that pension equalisation was not supposed to begin until 2020, as set out in the Pensions Act 1995, but that was accelerated in 2011 with no communication of or care for the effect on women. That had the added bonus—accidental, I am sure—of saving the Treasury about £5 billion a year by equalising the state pension age at 65.

In an interesting development, Baroness Altmann, who was formerly a great champion of older people but was neutralised in this debate by being elevated to the Lords and given a ministerial portfolio on pensions, has now told us that she was informed that the 1950s women

“would go away sooner or later.”

Well, guess what: they are still here. They are watching today in this Chamber and in towns and villages across the UK, willing this cruel and heartless Government to listen and do the right thing.

We continue to hear from this Government—I am sure the Minister is planning to mention it—that concessions of £1.1 billion have already been made. That figure is trotted out as though the Government have targeted money at the women affected. That is, at best, disingenuous. The £1.1 billion did not go solely to women and the concessions were limited to 500,000 men and women who were born within a short timeframe—between January and October 1954. The concession took the form of limiting the delay with the change in annually managed expenditure, estimated at £1.1 billion. I want to be clear: £1.1 billion of cash was not doled out to people in envelopes; in fact, it was not a monetary exchange for those involved.

Today I and my party stand beside the WASPI women, who have been the victims of a great injustice. As I said earlier in my speech, it is no less of an injustice than the poll tax. We will continue to stand beside them. The issue has not been debated in the Commons for more than nine months, and I am sure the Government thought the storm had passed. It has not passed. It will not pass. These women are engulfed by the storm every single day they have to manage without their pensions. Up and down the country, in all parts of the UK, WASPI women are watching the debate, inside and outside the Chamber—including Cunninghame WASPI, to whom I pay tribute. All the WASPI women are waiting for justice, hoping against hope that this heartless Government will finally hear their pleas for what is rightfully theirs to be restored to them.

Public Sector Pay

Debate between Chris Stephens and Patricia Gibson

Monday 4th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Chris Stephens]

Well, I would have thought a Conservative would know that the Scottish Budget follows the UK Budget. On 14 December, the Scottish Government—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) can shout people down and follow the lead of the Scottish Conservatives that we have seen in the last six months, but he obviously has not read the petition. We are debating a petition that says additional funding should be made available by the UK Government for this. As I said, a local authority, a health board or a devolved Administration should not be clearing up the mess of this Government, who continue to impose poor wages on public sector workers.

[Patricia Gibson]

Does my hon. Friend, like me, despair at the fact that there has been a £3.1 billion cut to Scotland’s budget since 2010? It is appalling that people representing Scotland in the Chamber today are attempting to ignore that.

[Chris Stephens]

My hon. Friend is right. The facts speak for themselves.

I am reminded of the speech I made in the Chamber less than two weeks ago on the Budget, in which I said:

“The only difference between this Chancellor and the previous one is that of style, not substance. Where George Osborne could best be described as a tin of gloss, superficially painting over the cracks in our broken economy, the current Chancellor is the tin of matt, hoping to hide the worst lumps and bumps with repeated applications of more of the same. Either way, they are both the same shade of Tory austerity blue”.—[Official Report, 23 November 2017; Vol. 631, c. 1255.]

As a former treasurer of Glasgow city Unison, I know all too well that trade unions have a welfare fund, which is an important aspect of membership and the recruiting of public sector workers. That branch’s accounts show that from 2010 to 2015, there was a year-on-year increase in spending of that welfare fund. Is that because the pay did not quite match the increases in food, housing and fuel costs? Of course it is.

Today, the average household has lost £7.74 per week due to higher prices for goods, including bread, milk and cheese. The Trussell Trust statistics tell us that in 2010, it delivered 61,400 emergency food parcels to hungry people. Today’s figure, which the Trussell Trust released last month, is 1,182,594 food parcels. All the evidence suggests that many of those going to food banks are, in actual fact, public sector workers.

Despite all the hints, the Budget failed to lift the public sector pay cap. With inflation at a five-year high of 3%, the value of public sector wages has collapsed. In 2017, the civil service people survey, referred to by the hon. Member for North Tyneside, has shown that satisfaction with pay and conditions has fallen and now stands at 30%.

The Government’s solution is to park the issue with pay review bodies. The problem with that approach is that 55% of public sector workers in the UK are not covered by a pay review body. They include jobcentre workers, who administer our social security and pensions system; those who staff our borders, working in immigration and asylum services; civilians in the Ministry of Defence, providing equipment and support to our armed services; and, of course, workers in the national health service and local government.

In November 2015, I secured an Adjournment debate to demonstrate the low pay in the Department for Work and Pensions. Over 40% of its employees were receiving tax credits. As a result of that debate, the Government had no option but to negotiate with the PCS a wage rise for staff in that Department.

Of course, there is the Treasury pay remit, which covers about 400,000 workers. This is the so-called delegated pay system—a notional arrangement whereby Departments and agencies are individual employers responsible for negotiating pay and conditions. Although the remit is “guidance” for civil service departmental employers and other bargaining units, it does set a pay cap framework.

That was not always the case. In fact, national pay bargaining was first introduced in the civil service in 1919, and that position held for more than 70 years until the then Conservative Government, over a period between 1994 and 1996, broke it up and delegated responsibility to individual departmental employers. The reality is not only that it is incredibly wasteful and time consuming to hold hundreds of sets of negotiations about an issue decided and controlled centrally, but that that has led to inequalities whereby staff at similar grades across Departments, and even across agencies within the same sponsor Department, are paid vastly different salaries.

A real danger of the Government’s current approach is that it will increase the gender pay gap, because it is clear that so far the Government have announced the ending of the pay cap for those services that are male dominated, and those Departments that are female dominated do not yet see evidence that the public sector pay cap will be lifted. That is a very dangerous route for the Government to go down.