Intergenerational Fairness

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Hon. Members might have heard me talk before about my issues with the estimates process. I do not agree that we should do them in this way and I think that the Government should seriously consider the reforms recommended by the Procedure Committee in respect of how we deal with them. We should be allowed to discuss and scrutinise them at length.

That said, I want to talk specifically about the intergenerational fairness report—it works quite nicely that I and my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) are the SNP team on this. I want briefly to touch on my story and then talk about some of the issues that people my age face. My grandparents were part of the silent generation mentioned in the report, my parents were at the tail end of the baby boomer generation, I am a millennial and my children are of the generation called “the latest”, which I think is sometimes termed generation X, but I am not sure.

My grandparents are still alive and have spoken to me about their story and the hardships they faced. In my family, we have faced all the issues discussed in the report. Those issues that people my age face differ from those faced even by relatively recent generations. There are issues with precarious jobs and the gig economy. It has not been talked about a huge amount today, but it is important to note that there is no longer the job security that some people had in previous generations. Young people cannot expect to walk into a job and still be there in 20 or 30 years. They walk in wondering if they will still be there in six months, given the precarious nature of contracts these days.

Another thing that has not been discussed is the fact that people my age are delaying having children, which stores up even more problems for the future demographically. What we should have been doing is having more children 20 years ago; now the problem is exacerbated even more because people are pushing having children later into adulthood. This is causing a problem, because we will not have the working-age population to support us. I am not going to be able to retire for another 38 years, which is when I will hit state pension age. By that time, I will have been working full time for about 49 years. Other people of my age are in the same situation.

Let me touch briefly on housing costs. In 1990, around the time that my parents were buying houses, the average housing cost in Scotland was 2.4 times the average income. By 2010, it was 3.7 times, so buying a house is much more difficult for this generation than it was for previous generations. One of the biggest problems that I see coming through my door is the lack of council housing. That issue can be firmly placed with the Thatcher Government and the right to buy. That is absolutely and unequivocally the reason for this problem.

I was a local authority councillor for a long time before I became an MP, and almost everybody who walked through my door had concerns about the lack of council houses. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, Scotland saw six council houses built across the whole country in that three-year period. Since then, we have cancelled the right to buy, and the number of council houses being built in Scotland is back to being more than 1,000 a year. It is not high enough—I would like to see us building more—but we are getting there. We are trying to dismantle the legacy of the Tory right to buy that has caused such a huge problem for this generation.

Let me briefly touch on how to fix the problem. I have touched on social housing. “Inclusive growth” is really important. It is one of those buzz phrases that are talked about. What inclusive growth means is not just sitting down to work out how to grow the economy; it is about sitting down to work out how to grow the economy so that everybody benefits—not just the people at the top of the pile. When we are thinking about how to grow that economy, we need to start by thinking about how it will benefit the people at the bottom of the pile who need it the most. That is what this Government have been lacking in their thinking about economic growth.

We need to have more children, but as I said we should have started doing that 20 years ago, and unfortunately we did not. What we need to do is ensure that we keep having the level of immigration that we have had. We should not have these attacks on immigration, particularly in respect of people who are coming here to study, for example, who then give us the benefit of that study by working in our economy, generating and paying taxes. It is important that people come here to study and then contribute to our economy. In many cases, they go back to their country, having paid taxes here, which is great and helps to support our older generations.

Finally—I know I am tight for time—as a millennial, I am not happy with the situation that people my age are facing: I am not happy with the precarious nature of the jobs market; I am not happy with expensive housing. However, I do not believe that we should take things away from the people who are currently pensioners in order to fix that. What we should do is to grow the economy inclusively, ensure that there are better workers’ rights and ensure that companies spread their wealth so that everything is not just divvied out to shareholders who already have lots of money. We should ensure that there is a fairer and more balanced economy, rather than taking things away from pensioners who have worked for so many years.