Pensions Bill [Lords]

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Glenda Jackson]

Regrettably, I was not here for the opening remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), but we are clearly of one mind. I share with her the total refusal to accept the Government’s interpretation of the situation in which we find ourselves. The Secretary of State made a passionate plea that the debt should not lay a burden on our children and grandchildren, but that plea would have played rather more resonantly with me were it not for the fact that his Government are punishing our children and grandchildren even as we speak.

My parents and grandparents had absolutely no qualms whatever about laying on my generation the burden of debt incurred by fighting and winning a second world war, and I have to say that I am extremely grateful to them for that. I also point out to the Secretary of State that in the intervening decades, the opportunities that were presented to me and millions like me in this country by, as my hon. Friend said, the introduction of the welfare state, had been not only unheard of but undreamt of by people from the social and economic background from which I came. Therefore I, like her, simply refuse to accept that the choices the Government are making in every single area of our national economic life will promote growth, provide a way forward or benefit this country.

I would be more prepared to believe that the changes to the pension system that the Government have introduced—which, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) said, are grossly unfair to women—were driven by the harsh economic climate, which the Government constantly pray in aid, were it not for the fact that that measly six months will save only £1.1 billion. The Government borrow something like 10 times that amount every week. I simply cannot make the figures match—but then neither can they.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I struggle to see the hon. Lady’s logic in comparing a debt carried over on behalf of the nation for the second world war with a pension debt that results from the demographic fact of an ageing population for whom we must pay. Is she saying that £1.2 billion is a measly amount? If so, where would she find the other £10 billion that the Labour party are committed to spending by not voting for the Bill?

[Glenda Jackson]

I trust that the hon. Lady would allow me to use my own adjectives—“measly” is not a word that would immediately spring to my mind to describe £1.1 billion. The fact is that the six-month “pause”, which might be a better word to use as far as the hon. Lady’s view of the economy is concerned, will apparently save the nation £1.1 billion. That saving will not come in until next year, and it is doing nothing to fill the current hole. That sum is a fraction of what the Government are borrowing week in, week out, because they have markedly failed to do anything to create growth in this country. They have done little or nothing to stimulate our economy. The hon. Lady may smile and shake her head, but I was taught that the only way to get something is by earning it. That is the only way to settle debt.

[Mrs Main]

What does the hon. Lady think that the money we borrow every week pays for? I suggest that it pays for the debt that we are all committed to reducing.

[Glenda Jackson]

The hon. Lady is plucking fantasies out of the air—fantasies that the Government have been running for months. The money is certainly not paying to ensure that every child in my constituency has a school place, or that every elderly person in my constituency has secure meals on wheels, or that day centres for the elderly remain open. The Government have done nothing to encourage young people to believe that they have a future. Whatever they are doing with the money, they are certainly not stimulating growth in the country.

I must return to the issues that we are supposedly debating. The Government have imposed a gross unfairness on one half of our people: women. That unfairness is absolutely unacceptable. As I had occasion to say to the Secretary of State in an intervention, for many women in my constituency, the changes to the Bill are nothing more than a cynical attempt by the Government to re-attract the female vote, which, as they read every day in the papers, they are losing.

On the one hand, the Government have introduced this Bill, but on the other, they protest that one of their central planks is ensuring greater equality for women. They say that they want more women in the boardroom, and greater wage equality and equality of opportunity, but then they decide that when a woman has worked all her life—as has been said, she will probably have been in low-paid work, doing two or three jobs at the same time, not least looking after her family, including both children and parents—and when her employment potential is nil, she must struggle on until the state pension comes in.

I strongly and heartily endorse many aspects of auto-enrolment. I do have concerns that the Government will not introduce sufficient teeth to ensure that, if the existing pensions industry does regard auto-enrolment as a business that they would wish to enter, the proper safeguards would be in place to ensure that it remains genuinely competitive, open and transparent, so that people who have never before considered having a pension will not find—as most of us do at the moment—the pension papers to be totally obfuscating so that we are no wiser about where our money is going or what the charges are after reading them.

It will not be possible for me to vote for this Bill, but I strongly endorse auto-enrolment. I urge the Government to think again, even at this late stage, about trying to eradicate this gross unfairness from the Bill.