Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Carolyn Harris Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)]

While the Chancellor seemed to think that last week’s Budget was an opportunity to celebrate the fact that the country had narrowly avoided entering recession, the fact remains that the UK will be the weakest economy in the G7 this year, and the only country that will see negative growth. True to form, when the Government came to choose who to give additional support to, it was the richest 1% and their pension pots when they abolished the £1 million cap on how much an individual can build up in their private pension before they pay additional tax. If, as the Chancellor suggested, the reason behind doing so was to keep doctors in work to boost our struggling NHS, that clearly could have been done through a tailor-made amendment to pension rules.

While the Government are helping the rich to get richer, there are people in my constituency and right across the country who cannot even dream of paying into a pension, let alone saving on the money they have to pay on it. We have families who cannot afford to put food on the table, working people queueing at food banks and children going to school with empty bellies, yet the Government’s response was to bolster the pensions of those who already have more than they will ever need. That is very wrong.

We all want to keep people in work, but to do that we need to help them by offering them the support they need, rather than just offering financial incentives to a tiny elite group. There are women who have worked all their lives, mostly on salaries, where a £1 million pension pot will never trouble them. They hit the perimenopause, and they become engulfed in self-doubt and in need of some minor adjustments to their working conditions, but at the moment, even though we have started to see a breakthrough, not enough businesses have that support in place. Some 10% of menopausal women are leaving jobs. One in four is reducing hours and thousands more are avoiding promotion.

Women are claiming benefits for the first time in their lives simply because nothing was done to help them remain in work, but by leaving work earlier than planned, their national insurance contributions may not reach the threshold for the full state pension, so they may well end up claiming pension credit. There are employers that have taken that on board and implemented changes that have been instrumental in retaining staff, and I welcome the development of a new standard on menopause in the workplace that will be launched by the British Standards Institution later this year. I am absolutely delighted that the Opposition have committed to improving menopause workforce support when we have a Labour Government, because we understand that it is the millions we need to be helping, not the millionaires.