International Widows Day

Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, as previous speakers have said, we owe a debt to the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for raising this issue today. We should also put on record our thanks for the work he has done through the foundation, in his mother’s name, to put this issue before us. It clearly does not get the attention it deserves. Thanks are due to the noble Lord for obtaining this debate today and for his dogged determination to ensure that this is not a one-off. Having another debate next year so that we can assess progress is clearly important.

One of the big successes of the noble Lord’s campaign was the establishment of International Widows Day, the purpose of which is to educate people about this issue—as we are doing now—to mobilise changes and the resources to achieve them, and to celebrate the successes that are possible. That is why this debate is important.

When someone is widowed, they obviously have to deal with grief and loss, but all too often there is economic uncertainty beyond that. I said uncertainty but I mean poverty, and that is the problem: it leads to poverty all too often. This brings me to the focus of my remarks: a large part of that is about pensions and inadequate provision for people who have to face the problems of widowhood.

In this country, the concept of a pension gap between men and women is receiving additional attention, but we still have a long way to go before achieving solutions. It is clear that the same pattern is being followed around the world. In fact, in preparing for this debate, I was somewhat concerned by—but ought to have known about—the lack of work being undertaken in this area. There is a lot of work on pensions, such as researching their effectiveness and changes in policy, but work on the specific issue of how the pension system works for widows is conspicuously lacking. The noble Lord asked the Minister to promise more research in this area, and more information is clearly needed so that the problems are clearer.

We do know about some of these problems. The fact that women are discriminated against in pay means that they end up with worse pensions; and women, in practice, tend to undertake more caring responsibilities, which, as things stand, rarely give rise to pension rights. That is the central problem. What to do about it and where the money will come from is the area that needs more work.

In the UK, pension rules by and large do not discriminate against women, although the fact that the rules as they apply to widowhood are extremely complex is a de facto problem. Probably hundreds of thousands of women—I think the DWP has acknowledged this—face problems accessing their rights because they do not know them or the system is so difficult to negotiate.

However, the biggest problem is the whole concept of derived rights. Women do not accrue pension rights in their own right. All too often, the pension system is established on the basis that the man is the breadwinner and the woman the caregiver. We are moving away from that. There is still a big historical legacy of that in the UK system, but it is endemic in pension systems throughout the world. We need to do research on derived rights and contingent rights: women need rights to a pension that is not linked to their marital status. The third area where more work needs to be done is lack of awareness. All too often, when someone is widowed, they simply do not know what is available, or there is no advice or access to advice, or to the information that would enable them to obtain the help available.

There is a focus on innovation and technology for gender equality, and we can very much look to technology to provide the information and support that people need to access the pension rights to which they are entitled.