Intergenerational Fairness

Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Andrew Murrison

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Frank Field]

It is, and my hon. Friend’s intervention could not be better timed. Members who followed closely the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas message will know of an example from Feeding Birkenhead. A family would lower their child into a supermarket waste bin to scavenge for food before rescuing them and seeing what food they had. The mother is suffering from cancer. She is now fed by Feeding Birkenhead with food that would otherwise go to the tip, but she says that she has never been better fed. Is this House prepared to continue policies that put so much pressure on working-age families that that example will no longer be exceptional? More and more of us will be troubled by examples of our constituents nobly not feeding themselves, as my hon. Friend says, and it will happen more regularly. Destitution is an issue.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I agree with the argument that the right hon. Gentleman is developing, but what he is suggesting would be politically unpalatable. Given that the majority of healthcare costs that we generate in our lifetimes come at the extremes of life, does he agree that one way of selling this to the population, and especially those pensioners who are principally in the frame, would be to say that the £2.2 billion per annum that the 2.5% element of the triple lock will probably generate by the end of this decade might be hypothecated into the national health service? In that way, we might gain some level of acceptance from pensioners.

[Frank Field]

Again, I could not agree more. I did not want to fan out the debate—I wanted to keep it as tight as possible so that we might get some agreement—but these are proper options that have to be considered. There is no way, sadly, that we as pensioners can get all the goodies and expect other people to pay for them. The issue of how we integrate care into the NHS will grow in importance as each month of this Parliament passes.

The fourth and last way in which we could keep the triple lock would be to raise the retirement age continually. Again, I make a plea to Front-Bench and Back-Bench colleagues, because such a policy would adversely affect our constituents almost more than any other. The Select Committee has published the names of the constituencies where the average life expectancy for males is such that they simply will not reach retirement age if we say that we will square the books by increasing the retirement age from 68, which is the figure that it is expected to rise to, to 70 or 71.

There is a commonality between the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), who leads for the Opposition on these matters, and my constituents. We do not say that no male in our constituencies will on average receive a pension if we raise the retirement age to 70 or 71, thank God, but we know that swathes of our poorer, older and frailer constituents will not actually reach the retirement line—the point at which they pick up the state retirement pension—at the age of 70 or 71, because they will simply have died.