State Pension Age: Women

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It strikes me that some of us in this House might do well to remember that our retirement might be a decision made by the electorate, who have every right to know when they can retire. They would know, were it not for the way in which the House passed legislation in 1995 and 2011 that changed the state pension age for women born in the ’50s and then failed to communicate that effectively.

The changes to the state pension age affect women such as a constituent of mine who recently came to me to tell me that although she had planned for her retirement for almost 30 years, she now found herself having to do two part-time jobs just to remain solvent. This is a woman who had worked all her life, paid her national insurance and saved for her retirement, and she now works as a cleaner and, as a result, suffers from arthritis. Her life today is very different from the one she anticipated. That she finds herself in this situation is not her fault but is down to the Government’s mismanagement. She was offered voluntary redundancy a couple of years before her anticipated retirement age. She calculated that with two years to go she could use the redundancy money, as well as her savings, to see her through, but she then discovered that she actually had to wait for the best part of a decade to retire. She has now used up her redundancy money, her savings have been whittled away, and she has those two jobs.

My constituent is not alone. Some 6,000 women in my constituency alone have been affected, and almost 3 million women throughout the country have been drawn into this unjust pension trap. Our constituents, in some cases our friends and members of our families, have been pushed into hardship, even poverty, after a lifetime of work. What is most galling is that the women who come to me, like so many others, have no quibble with the need to equalise the pension age with that of men. As has been said already, the issue is how it has been done. A situation has been created in which women born in the 1950s who, for the most part, worked all their adult lives, paid their national insurance and tax—paying for our education service and national health service—and planned for their retirement are now asked to wait.

During the general election campaign, an elderly person told me that they felt they were being punished by the Conservative Government for growing old. It is difficult not to agree with that today. One thing about this debate that has disappointed me has been the political point scoring between one side of the House and the other. Perhaps it is more important for all of us to rise above that and work to do something to reverse this monstrous injustice; otherwise, the electorate may well offer us all early retirement.