State Pension: Women born in the 1950s
Debate between Alex Burghart and Graham Stringer(6 years ago)
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Alex Burghart
The hon. Gentleman makes a genuinely interesting point about healthy life expectancy, the figures on which should feature more largely in the debate than they often do. I acknowledge that point.
When Lloyd George first brought in the state pension in the Old Age Pensions Act 1908, it was at 70, when life expectancy was considerably lower.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
I have no reason to doubt the hon. Gentleman’s statistics, but is it not just as interesting that the country is now three times as rich as it was when these ladies were born in the 1950s? When there have been other mistakes or crises in the economy, the Government have found money to bail out the bankers. If one compares the equity of this case to that, does the hon. Gentleman not think the Government should change their mind?
Alex Burghart
Presenting the case in the way that the hon. Gentleman does is slightly misrepresentative, because the cost of not bailing out the banks would have been extraordinarily high and would have seen businesses all over the country go bankrupt and people go out of work. It would have damaged their lives and would have become a cost to the state. I simply cannot see things in the binary way that he sets them out.
In 1942, William Beveridge wrote about the purpose of his pensions proposals, saying that
“giving to each individual an incentive to continue at work so long as he can, in place of retiring, is a necessary attempt to lighten the burden that will otherwise fall on the British community, through the large and growing proportion of people at the higher ages”.
Under the last Labour Government, it was acknowledged that we must not reach a position where women would be expected to spend 40% of their adult lives in retirement—that proportion is due to increase continually. No Government could have sustained that without dramatically curtailing services for younger people. On top of those demographic concerns, the Pensions Act 2011 had to deal with the circumstances that were dictated by the great financial crisis of 2008.