Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme

Debate between Helen Goodman and Andrew Bridgen

Monday 10th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a great privilege to speak in this debate. I want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), who is almost my constituency neighbour, on introducing this debate. In Bishop Auckland, I obviously represent hundreds if not thousands of former Durham miners who are affected by this injustice. As other hon. Members have said, mineworkers did difficult and dangerous work. They built the wealth of this country for over 150 years, and we owe them a huge debt.

One of the things in the Chief Secretary’s letter that really jumped out at me was her claim that the scheme works for beneficiaries. It patently does not work for beneficiaries. She says that the guarantee of value for individuals is that there should be no reduction in cash terms in the overall value of the mineworkers’ pension. What that means is that people can and, in fact, do see reductions in the real values of these pensions. This is deeply unfair. The Treasury has had £4,438 million from the surpluses of the scheme.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Does the hon. Lady agree with me that in this debate, for once, the right hon. and hon. Members taking part in it are not asking the Government to put their hand into their pockets, but asking the Government to get their hand out of the pockets of the former miners and their widows?

[Helen Goodman]

Well, I think we will hear whether Treasury Ministers see it in quite that way at the end of the debate.

The other unfairness is that, as hon. Members have said, the 50-50 split is completely arbitrary. No reason has yet been given as to why the split should not be 70-30 or even 90-10. Another point worth bearing in mind is not just that the mineworkers contributed to the scheme, but that for many years miners were not well-paid industrial workers. I hope my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) is not going to correct me, but my recollection is that, in 1972, the average wage of a miner was £26 a week. By no stretch of the imagination were people having a high standard of living, and the very least they can expect is that they and their families have a decent and dignified retirement.

Not only is this unfair, but it is also urgent. My hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) spoke beautifully about the impact on his family of the accidents and ill health that came with being a miner. In my constituency, the wards where the former miners live have a healthy life expectancy fully 10 years less than in other parts of the constituency. These are not one-off anecdotes; this is a whole systematic impact on communities.

My final point is that this is completely affordable. I think we have heard that the value of the pension to individual miners is now about £4,000 a year. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) said, the Treasury has grabbed the £4 billion, and having done this deal it is trying to hold on to it. I would like to set this in context. This is a Government whose Members are seriously considering electing as the next Prime Minister of this country somebody promising tax cuts worth £4,500 to everybody with an income over £50,000 a year. Surely if there is any commitment to justice in this country, before there are any more tax cuts for any wealthy people, the mineworkers should get their money.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Helen Goodman and Andrew Bridgen

Monday 21st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

I am not going to give way to the hon. Gentleman again, because other Members want to speak.

I want to address the Minister. When, in the previous Parliament, we introduced the Bill that became the Child Poverty Act 2010, he gave a great deal of evidence from the Family Budgeting Unit in York and the people at Loughborough about the minimum income standard—the minimum income guarantee. He said that what the Labour Government were doing was absolutely shameful and that benefits were not high enough. Now, however, we see that he is prepared to cut benefits in a way that we never did. The testimony to the great success of this Government’s benefit policy is the expansion in the number of food banks: in Durham last year, the food bank fed 4,455 people, of whom 1,390 were children. That is utterly shameful. To demonstrate that it is not possible to live on £22.96 a week, I am going to try to do so during the February recess. Neither I nor, I believe, any other hon. Member seriously believes that they could live on £22.96 a week. We have to look at this in context.

The Bill is unjust because it is simply not fair in the treatment of people in work and those out of work, and the treatment of people on high incomes and people on low incomes. When the dole was introduced in 1912, it was approximately a fifth of average earnings, and so it stayed until 1979, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said. By 1989, it was 15.8% of average earnings; by 1997, according to the House of Commons Library, it was 13.2%; and by 2015, it will be 11.1%. It is absolutely clear that the Government are trying to take it back to the very lowest point at the very bottom of the recession, irrespective of the impact on people’s normal standards of living. Everything the Prime Minister has said about those with the broadest shoulders bearing the biggest burden is seen to be utterly empty and fallacious when the Government introduce such a Bill.

There has been an ugly attempt to divide the poor between the “deserving” and the “undeserving”—taking us back to the 19th century—between sheep and goats, between strivers and shirkers, and between with those with their curtains closed and those with their curtains open. In my constituency, if people’s curtains are closed at 9 o’clock in the morning, it is probably because they are on nights and they are trying to catch up with their sleep. The Churches Regional Commission states that

“of all the words to describe those who depend on welfare, “feckless” has to be the one that rankles most.”

This attempt to divide has failed, however, on the factual ground that two thirds of those affected by the Bill are in work. The housing benefit and tax credit changes will affect far more people.

The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), who unfortunately is no longer present, tried to tell us that these changes will improve work incentives. As the noble Lord Freud said in the other House,

“there is an inevitable trade-off between the level of benefits and incentives to work. Raising benefit levels would undoubtedly hamper the work-incentive”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 October 2011; Vol. 730, c. GC498.]

Obviously, that is setting to one side the fact that in order to work harder the poor must be made poorer, but the rich can be made richer.

Let us look at the impact of the changes and the context. In my constituency, 7,200 people will lose out as a result of the Bill, by an average of £500; that will take £3.5 million out of the local economy. If the International Monetary Fund is correct, the second round effect will be even greater, at £4.5 million, so the net upshot is an £8 million loss to the economy of my constituency. It is no wonder shops are closing and small business are folding. That is absolutely illogical, and it goes against what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said about the need to let the fiscal stabilisers work.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Lady talks of her concern for the poor, and it is shared by right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches. The problem is that every time her party gets into office, its policies create more of them. Can she explain why the number of adults out of work for more than 24 months doubled in Labour’s last term in office?