State Pension: Women born in the 1950s

Ben Lake Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I thank the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) for bringing this important debate before us, and you, Mr Bone, for allowing me to speak directly after my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), who has worked tirelessly over the years to press this cause. He is a true champion of this subject and a far greater expert on it than me.

There are more than 5,000 WASPI women in Hartlepool. I am proud to say that this Saturday, the inaugural meeting of the first Hartlepool branch will take place. My hon. Friend will be the guest speaker. I pay homage to those women of Hartlepool, two of whom, Barbara Crossman and Lynne Taylor, are here today. The event on Saturday has been organised by Councillor Lesley Hamilton, Unison and local WASPI women activists, and will conclude a week in which we have championed the need for women to be engaged in politics. That irony has not escaped me. As parliamentarians, in the centenary year of women’s enfranchisement, we have campaigned all week for better representation for women in Parliament, celebrating the suffragettes and sporting their colours on both sides of the House. Yet this injustice towards women’s pensions lingers on without resolution.

It is unfortunate that there appears to be a fragmentation of those campaigning on this important issue—there is WASPI, CASPI, which stands for Campaigning Against State Pension Inequality, and the BackTo60 movement—because the main campaign is so important. The Pensions Act 1995 increased the state pension age for women from 60 to 65 in order to equalise it with that for men, with the change to be phased in over 10 years from 2010 for women born between 1950 and 1955. That transition was later sped up by the Pensions Act 2011. Those changes came as a shock to many women who had not been made aware of them. Some women found that they would have to wait up to six years longer for their state pension, which not only affected their retirement plans but pushed some into poverty and forced others to sell their home in order to make ends meet.

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his speech. If women were notified, it was more likely to be by those campaign groups than by the Department for Work and Pensions.

[Mike Hill]

The hon. Gentleman makes a poignant point.

Many of my constituents in Hartlepool have been affected in the way that I described. As a member of the Petitions Committee, I am well aware that the WASPI petition easily achieved the 100,000 signatures required to generate a debate in Parliament. Subsequently, there have been numerous debates on the subject, with one clear and stark exception—it has not yet been discussed in the main Chamber as part of official Government business. In fact, the Government continue to reject calls for compensation for the unfair ways in which the 1995 and 2011 changes were implemented, which affected the lives of around 2.6 million women.

The Government argue that they had to make the state pension more affordable to taxpayers. It has been estimated that the reforms have delivered £5.1 billion back to the Treasury. A study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that women’s household incomes reduced by an average of £32 a week as a result of the increase in the state pension age from 60 in 2010 to 63 in 2016. The IFS also says that the implementation has had a bigger impact on lower-income households—the knock-on effect was a 6.4% increase in the absolute poverty rate.

How can an estimated 3.5 million women, all upstanding citizens who have paid their dues to the state, be treated like this? They were the subject of legislation aimed at equalising the state pension age, but in the process of that happening, they were not properly notified, and therefore not given the necessary warning to make provision for the changes. They were quite simply caught out, which led to a sharp increase in income poverty among 60 to 62-year-old women. The changes have had devastating consequences for the women affected, including many in my constituency. For the Government to allow this state of affairs to continue is nothing short of a disgrace and a scandal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman]

The point of having a balance between spending on state pensions and the number of people coming into receipt of the state pension is to ensure that there is a state pension in the future. With a larger number of people becoming pensioners, any Government has to make assessments, as has been shown, and that is what has happened.

[Ben Lake]

Will the Minister give way?

[Guy Opperman]

I will give way in a second. First I will address the poverty point.

The hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) raised the issue of poverty and others have raised the United Nations report. In the early 1970s, roughly 40% of pensioners were in relative poverty. That figure is now down to 16%, one of the lowest rates since comparable records began. No one disputes that more has to be done, but that is a significant improvement. Since 2010, there are 200,000 fewer pensioners in absolute poverty before housing costs. That is a record low. The reality is that we spend approximately £121 billion on benefits for pensioners, which includes the £97 billion spent on state pensions this year—2018-19. The overall trend in the percentage of pensioners living in poverty is of a significant fall over several decades. At the same stage, the basic state pension has risen by £660 more than if it had just been uprated by earnings since 2010.

[Ben Lake]

I understand the Minister’s argument about the need to ensure that the number of people entering the state pension system is equalled out, but surely if we are to readdress the matter or rebalance any imbalance, it would be far fairer to do so for those in my generation, who have decades to plan for our pension and retirement, than to punish the women who for decades worked and strove, in the reasonable expectation of retiring on a particular date.

[Guy Opperman]

That is the debate that, clearly, has to be held. I return to the point that the decision was originally taken in 1993 by my—then very youthful— right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and was supported by a series of Governments and Ministers way more experienced than I am, who have been here over the past twenty-something years. I am merely continuing that debate and discussion about how we progress.