State Pension Age: Women

Debate between Tonia Antoniazzi and Luke Pollard

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

This is a huge issue. Where do these people stand now? That is the problem. People are busy; they are working, looking after grandchildren and running around the place. We all know what I mean. My mum is currently rushing around after my 14-year-old. Life happens. When people get a response, how do they react to it? This is why the groups of women who support each other on social media are giving each other a shoulder to cry on and a listening ear. They are a force to be reckoned with and I thank them for their work.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; she is being very generous with her time. There are 8,500 WASPI women in Plymouth, but they are dying. Justice delayed is justice denied, and many WASPI women are dying in poverty before they get justice and the pension that they deserve. The fight must continue in order to give the people who are still alive justice, as well as all the women we have lost.

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. I completely agree with him.

Can the Minister provide a rationale as to why the independent case examiner has closed these 2,505 cases, and say precisely why they were closed? Knowing this, the women would be able to work out which aspect of their case they could proceed with. Otherwise, how are they going to know what to do next? How many of these complaints could have been answered before 30 November, and why does it take so long to deal with them? Now they have just been filed somewhere, and that is simply not good enough.

I would like to raise my concerns about the recent written statement on the pension credit update of 14 January. Written statements are often seen in this House as a way to bury bad news, and these further changes to the pension credit rules appear to put strain on lower-paid women. Can the Minister confirm that the effect of this change will be to debar a pensioner of either gender from claiming pension credit until their partner also attains state pension age? This measure, if brought in on 15 May, will slash the income of couples affected who can claim pension credit in future by up to £7,000 a year, in the worst cases, compared with the current rules. It is also worth noting that many of those caught by this policy change are likely to be women born in the 1950s, who will have been hit by this double whammy and rightly feel especially aggrieved. I hope that the Minister can give further clarification on this point.

I want to give a personal angle. I am very proud of my constituents. A year ago, I held a meeting on this issue in Mumbles, with over 300 women attending. As I have mentioned, approximately 5,500 women in Gower have been impacted by the pension age changes. Since then, they have held a few meetings and set up the Pension Justice for Swansea Women group, which includes all the other local constituencies. I could talk all day about the cases of women across Swansea who have had their lives turned upside down. I know women whose projected state age pension had been part of their divorce settlement. Then, when the goalposts changed, they had to go and find work and be financially worse off. These are women who have had to find low-paid and unskilled work to make ends meet—and, as I have said, they were lucky to even find that job. I know many women who have caring responsibilities, including one who looks after her grandchildren so that they do not go into care and cannot find a job to fit in with school hours.

Private Probation Services

Debate between Tonia Antoniazzi and Luke Pollard

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on securing this important debate. I want to make some brief remarks about what people who work in probation in Plymouth have told me. We owe them a debt of thanks.

The Government’s part-privatisation of probation has been a colossal failure. The broken system is putting the public at greater risk and increasingly leaving taxpayers out of pocket. Ministers knew before the privatisation was put in place that the system would not work. Experts told them that it would conflict with best practice and put added pressure on staff, yet they went ahead. When it was obvious that the early CRCs were failing, the privatisation continued, meaning that people who relied on probation services to be professional and of high quality were being failed and, as a result, so were the public. Ministers must now know that it is unacceptable for the Government to continually bail out CRCs. It is time to draw a line in the sand. With our prisons in crisis, we need probation to perform without hindrance, organisational chaos and uncertainty.

The whole criminal justice system needs to be improved because it is not working. CRCs are not working. I fear that Ministers, not for the first time, are defending a broken system made worse by privatisation. Probation cannot wait for a Labour Government to end the shambles and bring the contracts back into the public sector, so we must put pressure on Ministers to act now. I fear that Ministers are conforming to type. When privatisation goes wrong they first defend the failure of the privatised services. Secondly, they reward the failure, as we see in the bailing out of CRCs. Finally, there is a continued failure to tackle the root causes of the problem: putting profit ahead of people, fragmentation of the services, and the way in which the system undervalues staff and misses results. Defending failure, rewarding failure and failing to tackle the root causes are the hallmarks not only of what has happened to probation services, but of the privatisation of our NHS, and we need to call it out. Probation is too important to let privatisation fail. We must make the system work, and if that cannot be done by bringing the contracts back in house, Ministers need to get a grip on the system.

Probation staff in Plymouth have told me a variety of stories about their experience of working in the system and about what it means for the people they are trying to help. It is worth remembering that people who work in probation do so because they want to make the lives of the people they work with better, reduce reoffending and protect the public. They show a genuine, caring devotion. They do not go into probation because they are looking for big pay cheques—they would be looking in the wrong place—but because they want to make a difference. That good will and the hard work of the staff is possibly the only thing that is holding the probation system together.

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

Following privatisation, probation officers in the national probation service have carried ridiculously high case loads of offenders who pose high or very high risk of harm. Probation officers working in the public sector do not have a balanced case load of medium and high-risk cases any more, as there was before the split. The pressure and stress of those cases together with the insufficient number of probation officers to do the job has resulted in unmanageable case loads and higher levels of sickness among staff. Has that been found in Plymouth?

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Having about 60 cases per individual maintains professionalism and a safe level of contact with offenders. It is now being reported that, in some cases, probation officers are handling 200 cases. The Minister has a famously good memory, but not everyone who works in probation has that. Remembering the details of 200 cases is asking too much of those who work in our probation system.

The staff I have spoken to in Plymouth have told me that they feel undervalued and overworked. The best practice that they spent years developing has been taken out of the system and good methods of rehabilitation have been stripped back. Staff have told me that they are worried that things are only going to get worse. One member of staff told me that she went into the profession because she cared. She told me that she loves her job, but all too frequently she is going home at night and crying because she knows that the level of care and professionalism she is able to offer is not what she would like. That damages her feeling of self-worth and of being valued by the system. These are precisely the type of people we need to retain and support in our probation system. It is a poor way to treat the people who keep our public safe.

In Plymouth, the failures of our probation system were brought home on new year’s day 2015 by the murder of Tanis Bhandari in Tamerton Foliot, which is in the constituency of the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer). In Plymouth, there has been a debate, led most ably by Councillor Philippa Davey, about the failures of probation to monitor Donald Pemberton at the time when he and Ryan Williams murdered the Plymouth builder, Tanis. Tanis was an incredibly popular figure within Plymouth, and the failure of the probation system to monitor the offenders probably directly led to that murder, because a better managed system would reduce reoffending. A poor probation system has real-world consequences, and Tanis’s family is one of the many families across the country that are being let down by a system that is not working and is clearly failing. How many more families need to be let down for Ministers to act?

The CRC system is not working. It needs to be brought back in house. I ask the Minister not to do the three things that we frequently hear from Ministers on broken prioritisation systems. Please do not defend the failure of the system or reward it any further. Please tackle the root cause: a broken and fragmented prioritisation system that is not working. Our public and the staff who do such an amazing job in our probation service deserve much better.