Pensions Bill [Lords]

Debate between Malcolm Wicks and Denis MacShane

Monday 20th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I was shocked when a constituent of mine, Mrs G. E. Smith, came in to see my at my last surgery. She will be 60 next month, and she was hoping to retire. She works in an exhausting cleaning job in a sawmill. I think Ministers have no idea what life in hard manual work is. She is shattered and wants to retire, but she has been told that she now has to go on another year, which will be injurious to her health. The Government have no idea of how what we used to call the working class suffer.

[Malcolm Wicks]

I imagine that that woman might have been categorised by the Office for National Statistics, rather inelegantly, as being part of the social class of “routine occupations”. That includes many women who are cleaners, and men who are manual labourers, van drivers or packers—heavily demanding work. Can they all look forward to living to 80 or, as the Minister likes to remind us periodically, to 100? Actually, they cannot.

The class differences are most pronounced for men, but they also exist for women. Here are the ONS statistics. Almost one fifth of men from the lowest social class—19%—die before reaching the existing pension age of 65. We talk about pension ages, but sadly a lot of these guys are already dead by that point. That 19% figure compares with just 7% from social class 1. For women, the respective figures are not so stark, but 10% in routine occupations die before the current pension age of 60—not like my right hon. Friend’s constituent, I hope, but with that type of job—while the figure is just 4% for those from the professional classes.