DWP Estate: Office Closures

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions if she will make a statement on proposed office closures in the Department’s estate.

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

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. May I seek your guidance on whether it is orderly for an hon. Member who has taken very substantial donations from a trade union to ask an urgent question on a matter of direct interest to that trade union?

[Mr Speaker]

We need to be careful. Is the right hon. Gentleman sure that the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) took the donation, or was it an agreement with the constituency party? This is a very serious allegation. Is it a constituency party donation or was it donated directly to the hon. Gentleman?

[Dr Murrison]

It is in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

[Mr Speaker]

That is not what I asked. We will leave it for now. We had better move on.

Intergenerational Fairness

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

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.

Welfare

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Crabb]

Spending on welfare is rising, so, yes, the budget is increasing. I repeat that the Government have not got plans for further welfare savings beyond those that Parliament has already voted for, and we will focus on implementing them.

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

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his appointment and statement. In May, he and I stood on a manifesto that pledged to protect pensioner benefits, so I am sure that under his stewardship there will be no backsliding on our commitment to older people.

[Stephen Crabb]

The commitment and promises that we made in our manifesto were clear, and the Government are absolutely focused on delivering those promises and keeping our commitments to the British people, including pensioners.

DWP Data

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I wish to say two things. First, I remind the House that moderation and good humour are underlined in “Erskine May” as being of the essence of good parliamentary proceedings. Secondly, it is important to say at the start that this urgent question is a narrow one, not an opportunity for a general exchange about employment support allowance or incapacity benefit, or the merit or demerit of the Government’s policies on those matters. There have been many such debates. This is an occasion for a narrow focus on the issue of data, upon which the urgent question was focused, so our proceedings will be tightly constrained. I do not intend there to be long exchanges on this matter. Perhaps we can be led, in a statesman-like manner, from the Government Back Benches by Dr Andrew Murrison.

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

My right hon. Friend will be aware of the well-established link between good health, particularly good mental health, and work. Will she ensure that in the long term her Department gathers information that will support or refute that assertion?

[Priti Patel]

Absolutely; we will be doing exactly that.

Disability Benefits and Social Care

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

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

My hon. Friend, like me, will have constituents who have found themselves at the whip end of work capability assessments conducted by Atos. I hope that her PIP assessments will be a great improvement on that and that we have learned the lessons from Atos and the work capability assessment criteria set out by the previous Administration. Is she able to give me that commitment?

[Maria Miller]

We certainly need to ensure that lessons are learned from some of the problems we inherited on the work capability assessment. Many have already been learned and there is a clear read-across in the work we are doing. Although the PIP assessment is very different from the work capability assessment, there are many lessons to be learned.

CPI/RPI Pensions Uprating

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I scoured the Welfare Reform Bill Committee discussions on that point, and as I understand it, those on the Labour Front Bench made it clear that they were not going to write their manifesto in advance of 2015. The hon. Lady can be assured, however, that I shall be pressing for that policy to be adopted.

Let me press on with Jim’s example. The guide to his pension—the “principal civil service pension scheme, classic”, as it is called—was published by the civil service in 2009. It explained that his pension would be “index-linked”. On page 24, the guide explained that this index-linking meant that

“your pension is guaranteed to increase in line with inflation, as measured by the retail price index”.

When he heard that the Government had changed the index-linking of his pension to CPI, he wrote to the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr Maude). He received the following reply:

“In hindsight, because the Minister has the discretion to decide which indicator best reflects the general level of prices, perhaps the booklet should have been drafted differently”.

That gives no satisfaction to Jim, who has lost so much money. He worked for 35 years with a guarantee of RPI, then, within a year of reaching his 60th birthday, the Government reneged on that guarantee. Over his retirement, the switch from RPI to CPI will not just be a minor change to an inflation indicator. For him, the switch will cost thousands.

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

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I believe that the legal position is that the Minister is allowed to take into account prevailing economic circumstances when making his judgments. Does the hon. Gentleman agree, however, that it is important that literature such as that relating to the armed forces pension schemes of 1975 and 2005 should be scrutinised to ensure that nothing within it could give anyone misleading information on which they might base their future pension plans?

[John McDonnell]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Jim did base his future plans with his wife on what he was told was a guarantee—a written guarantee—in the guide itself. That is not just unfortunate, but disgraceful. I agree that others should not be misled in that way in the future, and it should not have happened in the past. Thousands of pounds have been cut from Jim’s own pension. After 35 years of public service, the Government have knowingly cut his pension to pay off a deficit he did not create.

There are so many other Jim Singers. I recently met firefighters who were particularly angry that a firefighter retiring on a full pension will lose £52,000 over 20 years. This comes on top of a three-year pay freeze, after two years of only a 1% increase, which means no real increase in pension or pay for the best part of five years. The real cut in spending power for firefighters is a pre-retirement cut of 20% and a post-retirement cut of 22%. A 40% cut in income is a terrible price to pay for a crisis these people did not create.

I have met so many others, too. A Forestry Commission worker who worked for 24 years is losing £17,000; a jobcentre worker who worked at the Department for Work and Pensions for 26 years is losing £20,000; a tax inspector at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs with 36 years’ employment is losing £45,000. I became angry myself when I encountered examples provided by the Forces Pension Society of some horrendous losses—I do not know whether other Members have seen them. A disabled double amputee, a 28-year-old corporal, will lose £587,000 by the age of 70; a 40-year-old sergeant in the Royal Marines will lose £212,000 by the time he is 85; members of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary will lose literally tens of thousands of pounds. This is simply unacceptable.

Why, then, the change from RPI to CPI? In past discussions of this question, the Minister has been robust in his view that whether or not there was a need for cuts to deal with the deficit, CPI is a “better measure of inflation”. Numerous others have contested the suitability of CPI as an appropriate measure for pensions. The Royal Statistical Society is a particular example, and it provided us with another briefing yesterday. Its vice-president, Jill Leyland stated forcefully in a letter to the chair of the UK Statistics Authority:

“We do not feel that CPI currently serves the purpose of being a sufficiently good measure of price inflation as experienced by households to be used in uprating pensions”.

She went on to warn that its use would

“cause damage to consumer confidence in official statistics if it is perceived that uprating to pensions and other benefits is being governed by an index perceived by many as inappropriate and unfair.”

It was reiterated in the briefing sent to all Members yesterday that it is important for any index to enjoy the confidence of pensioners—and this index does not.

CPI was invented as a tool of macro-economic policy so that inflation rates could be compared across Europe, but because there was no agreement on how to calculate housing costs across European countries, that element was left out. CPI, because of its exclusion of housing costs, such as mortgages, council tax, and vehicle excise duty and TV licences, is criticised for not properly representing the real costs that pensioners face.

On top of that, as Members will know from the previous debate, there is what is described as the formula effect. CPI uses a geometric mean rather than an arithmetic mean, and we have long debates about those different means, so we have all become statisticians on this issue. In its calculations, CPI is supposed to take into account the ability of a person to shop around for cheaper goods. This—falsely in the eyes of many statisticians—assumes a sophisticated knowledge by pensioners of price variations and that consumers are sufficiently mobile to shop around. In reality, many pensioners are not the perfect shoppers of the economic model that CPI puts forward and are not mobile enough or capable of shopping around to secure the lowest price of all the goods in this basket.

Tackling Poverty in the UK

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

We should always seek to learn from the past. We will seek not to make the mistakes of the past 10 years, when billions of pounds were spend on employment programmes that failed to break down the culture of worklessness in many of our communities.

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

My right hon. Friend is speaking very well about the inequalities between rich and poor, mainly in an urban context. Does he agree that nowhere is that difference more stark than in rural locations? Despite their rhetoric on rural-proofing over 13 years, the Opposition did absolutely nothing to narrow that divide. Will he provide an assurance sought by my constituents, and confirm that the plight of the poor in rural locations—they tend to be among the poorest in our society—will be addressed during our coalition Government?

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. As we prepare the Work programme, I shall seek to ensure that it includes scope for the voluntary sector organisations that specialise in local communities and individual groups in our society that can make a difference. Groups that best understand rural areas can make the biggest difference to ensure that we help people in rural communities into prosperous and successful working lives, and not leave them stranded on benefits. I certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance.

We have a moral duty, even in difficult times, to do what we can to break down the cycle of deprivation that affects many of those communities. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and his team have committed years to identifying the challenges that face those deprived communities and how to solve them. We have demonstrated a willingness to look at ideas across the political spectrum. I am delighted that we can take advantage of the expertise of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead in his review. He is highly regarded in all parts of the House for the knowledge and insights that he has built up, and we look forward to seeing his conclusions, particularly on how we measure poverty and capture a more accurate understanding of it in all its forms. That work enables us to understand more clearly how to develop solutions for the problems that we face.

I hope that we can maintain dialogue with Members such as the hon. Member for Nottingham North, who is a leading thinker on how to use early intervention to tackle deprivation. He has worked closely with my right hon. Friend who is now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and we believe that this is an issue that should capture expertise wherever it lies. In addition, we have established for the first time a cross-departmental Cabinet Committee under the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend to ensure that we join up all the thinking and work that we do on social justice across government.

All of that will require radical reforms. It is about stimulating economic growth by moving more people into work; providing more effective routes into truly sustainable jobs; establishing clearer links between work and reward; and helping people to make responsible choices and save for their retirement. And ultimately, in these straitened times, we must ensure that we are using the money available to the best possible effect, both for those individuals and the taxpayer.