Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham]

I am semi-grateful for that intervention as well.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to the debate, and I have heard a lot of warm words from the SNP and from the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), but I have not heard any solutions, let alone how those solutions may be paid for by any future Government.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

I remind right hon. and hon. Members that interventions should be short. We are not doing very well at the moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

On a point of fact and reasonableness, none of the constituents directly affected by this issue whom I have spoken to have asked for any woman born in the 1950s to be able to retire at 60, but they have come to me with specific injustices, such as the women born in 1953 or 1954 who had 18 months added to their retirement age as a result of the 2011 change. That simply cannot be right and it does not really help the debate to try to claim that all these women are calling for something, which does not appear to be true.

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point but we are today debating a petition and I am just trying to focus on that. There is so much debate in the Chamber about exactly what we are talking about, and it is important that we consider the petition as it is written rather than as we might like it to be written, which is what he is talking about. Considering the petition is important, because so many people have supported it, but we also need to consider how any changes that would be made, in the way that is being suggested, would be financed. To ignore that and to simply try to pretend that that is not the case would not be fair on those who have created the petition and those who have signed it, because they are pretty clear what they want.

I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara), who will respond to this debate, will be clear about what the exact elements of the petition would mean. Equally, however, I hope that he will be clear about some of the other issues that hon. Members have raised, particularly the notification of those who have been affected by this change, which I will focus on in the remaining few minutes that I have.

The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) is absolutely right when she says that there appears to have been a great deal of communication —no doubt, extremely expensive communication—over a great many years but very little understanding of what has actually come out and been given to people. It is regrettable that the Pensions Act 1995 did not contain a requirement to communicate effectively with those who were affected by it. Although a leaflet was published at the time, I have no doubt that it was entirely ineffective.

Lord Willetts, who was a Member of this House at the time, pressed the issue back in 2002 in parliamentary questions. The hon. Member for Warrington North is absolutely right to say that at that point there was potentially a gross dereliction of duty at the DWP in not ensuring that there was more effective communication, but I guess that we could also look at the fact that the Department undertook research that clearly showed that three quarters of the women affected were aware of the increase in the state pension age. Perhaps that is why the then Labour Government did not do more at that point.

[Mhairi Black]

I just want to set the record straight. I am trying to draw attention to the poor level of communication and to the miscommunication, and I hope that the Government will learn from that.

[Mrs Miller]

I can reassure the hon. Lady that that is exactly the point I am making—a great deal of money was spent on things that clearly did not work. Otherwise, we would not be here today.

We know that the women who are affected were written to on numerous occasions. Clearly, they were not communicated with in an effective way, and some of the research I have referred to may well have been misleading in the impression it gave to the then Labour Government and the coalition Government that followed.

What I would like to hear from the Minister today is exactly how he will ensure that not only will the women currently affected by the situation really understand the true position that they are in following quite complex mitigation but that we never, ever find ourselves in this situation again.