Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women

Debate between Edward Leigh and Owen Smith

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes that the e-petition 110776, Make fair transitional state pension arrangements for 1950s women, has attracted more than 150,000 signatures; and calls on the Government to bring forward proposals for transitional arrangements for women adversely affected by the acceleration of the increase in the state pension age.

I want to start today’s important debate by saying how lucky I am to come from a family in which there have always been such strong and hard-working women—my mother and grandmothers, and now my wife and daughter. If there is one thing I have learned from all of them, it is that no one should ever try to pull the wool over their eyes—to take them for fools—because I guarantee they will always be found out.

That is a lesson the Tories really should have learned back in 1991—when they first started planning to equalise the pension age for women with that for men—because that is precisely what has happened: they have been found out. They have been found to have failed in their duty to inform women properly about the changes that were planned. They have been found to have left hundreds of thousands of women ill-prepared for a decision that would see the worst affected lose up to £36,000 in pension payments. They were found to have compounded their error in 2011, when a further delay to the pension age—to 66—was rammed through with barely two years’ notice. In the words of their current Pensions Minister, they have been found to have “pulled the rug” from under 2.6 million British women. Today, Labour will speak for those 2.6 million women and demand that the Government tell us what they plan to do to make amends.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Before we get too party political about this, it can indeed be said that an individual notice should have been given back in 1995. However, shortly after that, Labour came in, and there were perhaps a dozen Labour Pensions Ministers during all of Labour’s time in office. We are 20 years on. Can the hon. Gentleman not accept that we all have lessons to learn? An individual notice should have been sent out by at least one of those Governments—by the Conservative Government or the Labour Government. The hon. Gentleman had an opportunity to do that over all those years.

[Owen Smith]

With respect, I did not have an opportunity because I was not here at the time. The hon. Gentleman is right that successive Governments have lessons to learn from this sorry affair, but the truth, as I intend to spell out, is that a change was first mooted in 1991, and the then Tory Government made no substantive efforts between 1991 and 1997, when they left office, to offer people a proper notice. Thereafter, the Labour Government did attempt to do that, and I will enumerate exactly the ways we tried to make amends. However, the problem was compounded by the coalition Government’s actions in 2011. If anybody has lessons to learn, it is the Conservative party, which has the greatest responsibility for these changes, and which now has a duty to make amends.