State Pension: Women born in the 1950s

Alan Brown Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I promise that my brief remarks will last less than 17 minutes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) on securing the debate and on making such a powerful speech. She covered the issue, but what she said about the number of people who are suicidal, attempt suicide, or self-harm, was particularly pertinent and should make the Government sit up. That sums up the injustice of the issue; the Government should really listen.

Once again, I am here to speak on behalf of the 6,500 women in my constituency who have been affected by the various Pensions Act changes. First of all, I want to look at some of the politics surrounding the pension changes and the subsequent developments. We all know that the women affected by the Pensions Act 1995 were not properly notified. That is completely undeniable and even loyal Tories have acknowledged in previous debates that there were “communication issues”, which is certainly an understatement. Many Tories have stated their genuine concern and have signed up as backers of the WASPI campaign, yet all these years and months later, there has been no change despite the fact that we now have a minority Government. How hard can those sympathetic Tories really be working their Government on the issue? The Democratic Unionist party were able to extract concessions to prop the Government up, but that is proving very challenging for Conservative Members.

As the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) demonstrated in his speech, too many Tories blindly back the mantra that there was a £1.1 billion concession during the Bill stages of the Pensions Act 2011. Not robbing women of an extra £1.1 billion is not the same as putting money into the system. It was just a bit less of a shafting for some of those affected, and I could not believe that the hon. Gentleman repeated that myth. We then hear the bigger picture: the Tories blame all the cuts that they imposed on the financial crash and the previous Labour Government. I might agree that Gordon Brown squandered billions of pounds, but while the Tories impose spending cuts, they have no problem introducing tax cuts for the wealthiest.

A Library briefing with projections of Budget measures from 2017 and 2018 estimates that the tax giveaways such as corporation tax, inheritance tax and higher income tax thresholds will cost the Treasury £78.6 billion pounds between 2017 and 2025. It is clear that austerity is for some but not for others. The fact that the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar said that compensation is completely unaffordable just shows that those choices have been made by Members in the Division Lobbies.

The Liberal Democrats now fully back WASPI, but the Minister for Pensions in 2011, Steve Webb, was one of theirs. They are the ones who started the austerity process in coalition with the Tories. Back then, Steve Webb estimated that if the timetable was not altered, pension spending would be £26 billion higher over a decade. Why was that figure so important in the grand scheme of Government spending when, as I have pointed out, tax cuts have suddenly become affordable?

Labour—Scottish Labour, in particular—is peddling, along with the Tories, the myth that the Scottish Parliament should be able to rectify matters for affected Scottish women. That comes after it said that pensions would be protected by Scotland remaining part of the UK in 2014, and after it fought tooth and nail against the concept of pensions being devolved to Scotland. Labour made sure pensions were not a Smith commission recommendation. The Scotland Act was designed specifically to make pensions a reserved matter and ensure that the Scottish Government could not introduce an age-based benefit. Why has Labour bought into the Tory sleight of hand which says that we can make changes in the Scottish Parliament while our budget is cut by £2 billion over a 10-year period? It was also a Labour Government that devolved pensions to Northern Ireland, while steadfastly refusing to do so for Scotland, which is another mystery that I cannot get my head around. Those parties all have culpability either for the current situation, or for masking responsibility for it.

Meanwhile, our constituents still suffer. I have been contacted by a constituent who has been fighting for 18 years to get her dead husband’s Metropolitan police pension. Recently, when she had primary care duties for her mother, she had to fight local authorities in England to get her mum into a care home. She has also been hit by the increase in contributions required, and is trying to pay more into the system—another five years’ contributions—so she gets a full pension when she reaches state pension age. She still has four years to go to reach her new state pension age, and without her widow’s pension she is in real financial hardship. She says that she does not want to access benefits because of a fear of the assessment process and of the threats and demands placed on jobseekers. That is the reality of the Government policy about which the UN special rapporteur says UK Government Ministers are in denial.

Finally, I pay tribute to a WASPI constituent of mine, Ann Hammil, who first raised the WASPI issue with me a number of years ago. She has fought her corner with the authorities and her case is now with the parliamentary ombudsman. The other week, she said to me:

“Alan, I will not give in to them.”

I completely support her attitude and that of other WASPI women and campaigners all over the UK. I hope I can help them achieve justice.