Pensions Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lyn Brown and Anne Begg

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Dame Anne Begg]

The hon. Gentleman has just made my point for me. Yes, we would feel a lot better, but if we had gone into the operation not expecting to lose either leg, but discovered afterwards that we had lost one, we would be absolutely devastated. The result would appear to be the same, but the emotional trauma caused in the meantime is quite different. That is exactly the position faced by these women.

The women we are talking about are not rich; they are not people for whom a billion pounds here or there amounts to pennies or not much money. These are women who have made the financial calculation that they will be able to get their state pension at a particular age. Some of them are still making the calculation that they will get the state pension at 60. I received an e-mail today from someone who could not understand why her pension age had gone up by 30 months. It is because she had not taken into account the original equalisation. That is no fault of the Government, but it illustrates the fact that people need a lot of time to prepare for the change, and even if they have had the time, they are not always prepared for it.

For the group of women who had not realised that the state pension age was going up to 65, it is a double whammy to discover that it is now going up to 66 and that they must face waiting that extra time, perhaps with no income at all. Many of these women will be in that position, even if they have taken early retirement for one reason or another. We know that by the age of 65, only about 40% of women are still in work; they might have fallen out of work for various reasons. Those women will have been depending on getting not just the basic state pension, but probably pension credit and all the other passported benefits that were mentioned earlier. For these women, there is a big hole in their financial planning. We have heard much about the Government’s debt meaning that they cannot possibly afford to do right by the group of women concerned, but the effect will be on those women’s personal debt. They will have to borrow money or in many cases live in pretty dire circumstances if they do not get the pension when they were expecting to get it.

[Lyn Brown]

Does my hon. Friend agree that these women will have to use any small amounts of capital they have to tide them over until their pension kicks in, possibly making them more reliant on state aid once they reach retirement?

[Dame Anne Begg]

Indeed, and there will be many such examples.

Women who hoped that their campaign would move the Government feel very disappointed. It is true that those in one group may have to wait for 18 months rather than two years, but they are still extremely disappointed at the Government’s failure to recognise that what they propose will have a disproportionate effect on a number of women who no longer have time to plan adequately for the future.