State Pension Age (Women)

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley]

rose—

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

rose—

[Richard Graham]

Hold on a moment—let me finish what I am saying.

Were the intention simply to change all the arrangements for women born in the 1950s and go back to the original proposal, that would, I believe—the Minister might want to put a more detailed figure on it—cost the taxpayer about £10 billion. Yesterday we had the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith), calling for changes to universal credit that were not costed and for which he offered no alternative in terms of where the money would come from. Today we have a proposed transitional arrangement that might cost £10 billion, but its detail has not been spelled out, and neither has its exact cost or how it would be paid for.

I believe that it is incumbent on all of us as MPs partly to represent the emotional feelings of our constituents, as has been done very well by a number of Members today, but also to reflect on the reality, the cost and the implications of what is being proposed, which remains an open question.

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[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. It is typical of this Government’s approach to such things.

[Mark Durkan]

My hon. Friend may recall that a further transitional arrangement was proposed when the Bill went through in 2011. In October 2011, an arrangement was proposed that would have meant nobody had to wait more than a year, rather than up to 18 months, to reach their pension age. It would have cost £10 billion over 10 years, and it would have meant having a common state pension age in 2022. That was proposed, but the Government rejected it.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, which I hope has helped the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins).

As I have said, I am very happy to pen a very detailed plan to help such ladies, but if I write it, I would like the Government to promise to implement it. Perhaps the Government will give me an assurance that, when I come up with suggestions about how to deal with various problems, they will say, “Yes, you are right: the hon. Member for Bolton South East has come up with a solution, and we will actually implement what she says.” Will the Minister make me such a promise?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

It was a privilege to hear the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) move the motion, and it was an honour for me to join her in approaching the Backbench Business Committee to request the debate. There have been some powerful contributions from a number of Members who have campaigned on this issue in this and, indeed, the last Parliament.

We have heard much reference to the former Minister Steve Webb, and to what he has recently said. The question that now arises is this: if the Minister himself was subject to some misunderstanding or misapprehension—if he was in some way misled or misinformed—was the House in turn misled and misinformed in 2011, when he made various statements about impact assessments both in the Chamber and in Committee?

I often hear in the House about the principle that one Parliament cannot bind its successor. We are talking about an issue, and a choice, for this Parliament. Those who were not here in 2011 but are here now cannot wash their hands of this and say, “It is nothing to do with us.” This is a choice for us. The fact is that if the Minister was not fully aware of the facts by the time the Bill had completed its passage, other Members were not either, and the people who are directly affected by these changes certainly were not. Given that they are now so active and animated through the WASPI campaign, it is clear that if they had been aware of the facts much earlier, they would have been active much earlier.

It is insulting for Conservative Members to suggest that perhaps people had been informed and simply did not know, and if they did not know they should have known. These women have demonstrated that had they known about the position, they would have done something about it, both in terms of their personal circumstances and in terms of the public policy challenges that they would have issued. Conservative Members also came out with the nonsense that there was no alternative: that they were seeking transitional arrangements leading to pension equality, but none had been proposed. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) about the “hard shoulder” arrangements that had been introduced in other countries. Moreover, as I pointed out in an intervention earlier, additional transitional measures were proposed during the Bill’s passage in 2011, but were voted down by the Government.

In May 2011, during a debate in Westminster Hall, I said that if the Minister did not indicate that he would revise the proposals in the Bill because the women involved were an unintended anomaly, those women would have no choice but to conclude that they had been calculated as the victims of an intentional injustice—a drive-by hit on their pension rights. That is how things stand. If we fail to pass this motion, we will be saying that those women are an acceptable casualty on the way to equality, and we cannot accept invidious treatment in the name of equality.