Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship in this important debate, Mr Stringer. I commend the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for securing it and the members of Women Against State Pension Inequality, many of whom are here, for their successful petition.

There is a great deal of heat in this debate; I hope that at the end of it, we will get a bit of light as well. We owe it to the many people who have signed this petition to lift the fog of debate. I say that because many of my constituents have contacted me to ask for clarification of many of the issues raised here. The Minister has an important role to play in ensuring that some of those issues are clarified.

What is clear is that we all agree on equalisation of the state pension age. It is the right thing to do. It is equally right that we are regularly reviewing the age at which we retire. The great news is that we are all living longer, but we cannot possibly expect that not to affect the age at which we can retire. Surely it cannot be sustainable for us to live longer in retirement than in employment. The sums simply do not add up.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the right hon. Lady have some heart for my constituent Lilian, who this year had the honour of receiving an MBE but was told in the same week that she is not getting her state pension? You could not meet a more loyal person or a more honoured person, nor a more betrayed person.

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Gentleman makes his own point in his own way, but we are trying to take some of the emotion out of this debate to get to some of the facts, and we owe it to those people who are really heavily engaged in this debate to do that.

We need a fairer pension system and one in which everybody knows what they are going to get out of it at the end, not only from the state pension system but from private pensions as well. It would be very fair of us all here today to be highly critical of the pensions industry for the opaque way in which it operates, which makes it is very difficult for us to know exactly what we will get and when.

I shall refocus on the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) made, namely that the petition being debated today creates some of the fog because it appears to call for change that puts all women in their fifties who were born on or after 5 April 1951 and who are affected by the changes to the state pension age to be in exactly the same financial position that they would have been in if they had been born or before 5 April 1950. That appears to be a call for a significant change, which I am not sure has been advocated in the contributions made by hon. Members thus far.