State Pension: Working-class Women

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Nicholas Dakin

Thursday 9th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Constituents of mine have been in exactly the same position as Mrs Tenniswood, so her case is not exceptional, but unfortunately very much the norm. These women have paid in year after year and then, when they come to take back something that they thought they would receive, it is not there. Not only that, but they cannot get other entitlements that are linked to the age of retirement, so it makes things very difficult for them. Sometimes, if they fall on hard times, the Department for Work and Pensions deals with them in a way that is demeaning, which also does not help.

[Chi Onwurah]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I said, part of the debate is about dignity in old age. It is also about the contract with the state. In fact, he has anticipated what I was going to say. In the case of Mrs Tenniswood, one bureaucratic letter took away the certainty that she had had for most of her working life in a very hard trade. The belief that the state would provide her with a pension in her old age—one she had earned—was torn to shreds.

Because Mrs Tenniswood is working class, her life expectancy is lower. In Newcastle, the gap in average life expectancy between inner-city Byker and more affluent South Gosforth is 12.6 years, and the gap is rising under this Government. This pattern is repeated across the country. Owing to the health inequalities from which we still suffer, working-class women are on average expected to die seven years earlier than their peers from more affluent backgrounds. When Mrs Tenniswood finally receives her pension, she can expect to have less time to enjoy it than other women of her age, and she is likely to have a worse experience of old age.

A quarter of Newcastle’s neighbourhoods are in the 10% most deprived in the country. In Newcastle, we are more likely to die earlier from cancer, heart disease and strokes. We suffer from the diseases of our industrial legacy, such as asbestosis. Heart attacks are responsible for 1,100 premature deaths in the north-east every year, which is higher than the national average because of the income disparity. Such inequality is replicated in regions across the country. Data from the Office for National Statistics tell us that, compared with women who live in more affluent areas, working-class women will live for 19 years longer in poor health. So they live shorter lives and a higher proportion of their time is spent in poor health before they die. That is also true of working-class men; I recognise that. They also suffer from significant health inequalities, but, as we have heard, they have not had their expectations of retirement overturned without any attempt to ease the transition.

Our pension system, and the wider system of social security of which it is a part, was founded on the principles of reciprocity, justice and fairness. I fail to see anything just, fair or reciprocal in the treatment of the WASPI women by the Department for Work and Pensions. The Government have rejected many opportunities to deliver a fair settlement for WASPI women, and by accelerating the changes they have embedded unfairness. To add insult to injury, they insist on ignoring and trivialising the issue.

Last week the Minister, who is with us today, refused to use the phrase “working-class” in what passed for an answer to my question on the subject, and argued that

“we are all working now.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1171.]

I take issue with that premise. In Newcastle, unemployment stands at 5.4% of the economically active population, which is almost twice the national average, and that figure is rising year on year. The figures are even bleaker for older adults. Nationally, the employment rate for people aged 50 to 64 is only 70%. Last Thursday—the same day I asked the Minister my question—the DWP published a guide to help employers hire older workers, noting that three out of four retiring men and two thirds of women have not worked for five or more years. So we are not all working now. Perhaps the Minister was not informed that that was a priority for her Department: hardly an example of joined-up Government.

Irrespective of whether the Minister believes that we are all working now, the conditions that we work in are not equal. Perhaps the Minister should consider that not all women were so fortunate as she was, staying in full-time education until the age of 22—[Interruption.]—Twenty-one. The Minister corrects me. And immediately starting work as a researcher for an MEP who happened to be her father. I do not want to make assumptions, so perhaps the Minister will clarify whether she considers the job working for her father, or a subsequent one as chief executive officer of the National Pony Society, to have been manual labour.

One of the women who got in touch with me told me:

“The Conservative Government has never had pocket money, just blank cheques—they have no idea about the real world.”

I will leave it to others to decide whether that is a fair depiction, but it is obvious that the Government have not done enough to help the women. Talk of a Government who work for working people would be laughable were it not such a serious subject.

Whenever such issues are raised, we are told that we live in a country with a social security system that prevents changes such as the change in pension age from leading to hardship. If the Government seriously believe that our social security system—gutted under Tory changes since 2010—is providing adequately for the women, perhaps it is true that

“they have no idea about the real world.”

However, I will give the Minister the opportunity to demonstrate her understanding of reality by asking her: first, does she acknowledge the existence of working-class women? Secondly, does she acknowledge that although many more of us may be working now, working-class women, who often face the challenges of poverty predominantly in manual trades, have specific experiences? Thirdly, does she acknowledge that working-class women were more likely to start working earlier, and to work in jobs that take a higher toll on the body? Fourthly, does she acknowledge that working-class women are more likely to die younger and to suffer more ill health in retirement? Fifthly, does she acknowledge that they are more likely to be more dependent on the state pension, not having benefited from subsidised work pensions? Does she agree that those five factors make it much more likely that they will not benefit from their retirement to the extent that more privileged groups do, and that the state pension changes are therefore more unjust? Will she commit to considering transitional arrangements for WASPI women? Will she commit to working with the Treasury to announce a solution to the dire predicament in which so many women have been left in the forthcoming Budget?

I called this debate on behalf of all women whose lives have been blighted owing to the ill-considered and discriminatory nature of the changes. As I started with the example of a constituent, I would now like to end with the experience of another working-class woman who, to my great regret, did not live long enough to be a constituent of mine: my mother.

My mother was born in the 1920s in the depths of another great depression when there was no national health service. She grew up in Newcastle in great poverty. Of her six siblings, only one survived into adulthood. Five died of the diseases of poverty: diseases that, in the absence of the national health service, destroyed the lives of so many and had consequences much later in life, causing health inequalities that the health service cannot eradicate—certainly not one as underfunded as the NHS is now. I am sure that that childhood poverty influenced her life expectancy. She died before her 70th birthday, but had lived—cheerfully—with ill health and disability for two decades previously.

It is absolutely iniquitous to imagine that my mother would have had perhaps just three or four years of pension —and that in great ill health—because the Government cannot recognise a fundamental injustice, and, indeed, do not even recognise the existence of working-class women. The debate is, however, not about my mother’s experience, or even Mrs Tenniswood’s experience; it is about the experiences of tens of thousands of working-class women whose lives and retirement have been blighted by changes that were ill-advised and poorly implemented, and in which they and their experiences were not considered.

I want to close my remarks with a small selection of quotations from the appeals that I received. One woman said:

“Stress has made me so ill, physically exhausted and mentally struggling to survive”.

Another said:

“Being too disabled to work is humiliating enough without being made to suffer further humiliation at my age. Hopes, dreams and careful plans to enjoy our retirement shattered. Savings all gone, future bleak! No letter, no notice.”

This came from another woman:

“I am at times very depressed as it felt like I had done a prison sentence for 44 years then, just before my release date, it was extended another six years.”

I came into politics to fight for people like those women, but I am not simply fighting on their behalf. I am fighting with them, side by side.

Another WASPI woman said:

“My mother welded fan blades for Ford Dagenham and it was women who all stood shoulder to shoulder that achieved equal pay for women.

Nothing is ever impossible if women are united in their cause.”

I believe that to be the case and I plead with the Minister to heed the voices of the thousands of working-class WASPI women who are crying out for justice.