Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for the eloquent way that she opened this debate. May I also say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer? I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) to her Front-Bench position. Mainly, however, I pay tribute to the WASPI women—Women Against State Pension Inequality. I have stood with them for quite some time because there is a real injustice here and it is about time that Parliament served these women as well as it ought to.

Mr Stringer, in future we will probably need a bigger venue and more time for a debate on these issues, and the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) has proved that someone does not need 23 minutes to make a good speech but they certainly need 23 minutes to make a bad one.

Hon. Members will know that my interest in this issue is a long-standing one, and for good reason. They will also know that when constituents come to an MP in numbers and tell them that the Government are doing them an injustice, the MP’s ears perk up and they just know that something big is coming. Well, 140,000 signatures on an e-petition is something pretty big and that is why I pay tribute to those women who have secured those signatures.

The problem is not a new one. When these women realised what had been done to them, they found it difficult to get their voices heard. What I knew was that often women of that age have not had the best luck in life. Women in their 60s still earn 14% less than men and many do not have private pensions. Until 1995, women who worked part time were not even allowed to join company pension schemes, and others did not qualify because they took time away from work because of ill health or to fulfil a caring role.

I do not want to repeat what other Members have said or predict what others will say, but I will make a few brief points, to which I hope the Minister listens carefully. First, when the Pensions Act 2011 was debated on the Floor of the House in June 2011, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said:

“We will consider transitional arrangements.”—[Official Report, 20 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 52.]

These ladies are still waiting for those “transitional arrangements” and time is quickly running out. I hope that when the Minister comes to respond, he will finally set out what these “transitional arrangements”, which these women were promised, are.

I am sure that the Secretary of State, wherever he is, knows that we will not stop asking questions about this issue; we have raised it many times before and we will raise it again, In the previous debate on the issue, I said that the WASPI ladies were, like wasps, not easy to bash away; when someone tries to bash a wasp, they get angry and they come back and sting. I fear that the Minister is in for multiple stings unless he changes his ways.

I will very briefly mention the Second Reading debate in 1995. In opposition, the Labour party, under Tony Blair, tabled an amendment to point out that the Pensions Act 1995

“does not fully reflect the importance of pensions as a form of deferred pay, takes too rigid an approach to the equal treatment of men and women under the State pension scheme, and includes a range of proposals designed to undermine the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme and disadvantage occupational as against private pension provision.”

The Conservative Government at that time ignored that amendment, which fell by 267 votes to 228. The amendment summed up our concerns about the 2011 Act, and we made much the same point in the debates about that Act.

Who else shared our concerns in 2011? Well, the current Minister for Pensions, Baroness Altmann, did. Back in 2011, in the same month when the 2011 Act had its Second Reading, she said:

“Ministers must listen to reason on this issue. The current plans are unfair and may, indeed, be illegal in public law terms”.

It is amazing what a subsequent ministerial salary can do. That is the biggest conversion since St Paul on the road to Damascus.

A number of constituents have come to me, including one who worked for the Department for Work and Pensions who said that even she was not aware of many of the changes. Indeed, the WASPI women have today been tweeting that the DWP website still says that the state pension age is 60. What a farce! I hope that the Minister will do the decent thing, listen to these women and give them the justice they deserve and the transition they want.