State Pension Age: Women

Debate between Mhairi Black and Alan Brown

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)]

I have to start by saying that I am feeling very, very humbled here today, because the Conservative Benches are the busiest that they have ever been for me, talking on this issue.

Unfortunately, I have to start off on a negative point. Earlier, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) talked about Members of Parliament finding themselves continually criticised for their point of view, whether that be on Twitter or when they meet people on the street or in their surgeries. The response to that should be for MPs to go away and reflect on whether they are in the right position and have the correct opinion. You do not turn round and call an entire fantastic, intellectual campaign hate-filled. You do not accuse them of having a hate campaign; you listen to them and you form your views.

We have debated this issue five times, I believe, so this is the fifth time I am speaking on it. It is important to reflect back on how we ended up in this position. Nearly a year ago today, I stood pretty much on this spot and argued for the WASPI campaign. I argued that this problem was happening and explained how it came about, and I tried to give the Government the benefit of the doubt. We said, “You have to accept that the Government have messed up. You have to accept that problems have been created and you have to come up with something.” It is truly an embarrassment to this House that we are still waiting on a Government plan for making this better.

The SNP went away and spent our own money to get a constructive report. We could easily have said, “Get rid of the ’95 Act altogether;” we could have said a million and one things, but instead we went away and found credible economists, put together a cracking report and tried to build a bridge that all parties in this House could cross. Instead—[Interruption.] If the Secretary of State wants to make an intervention, I am more than happy to take it. Until then, I suggest he listens.

When we put forward our report to the Government, so that they could listen to it, what was their response? In the Westminster Hall debate a couple of weeks back, the Minister said that,

“the Government’s position is very clear: this was not a contract. State pensions are technically a benefit.”—[Official Report, 15 November 2016; Vol. 617, c. 44.]

That utterly pathetic response shows that this Government are determined to wriggle out of their responsibility for these women.

A Government Member said earlier that we now say to women that they have to pay in 35 years of national insurance and that that is how they are entitled to their pension, but the women we are talking about have paid in for 40 years, for 45 years and some of them for 50 years, yet we are being told that they are still not entitled to their pension. The Government are refusing to pay women what they are owed, and I am sure that the 2.6 million women will remember that the next time they are standing at the ballot box in an election.

The hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) said earlier that Germany made these changes in 2009 and he asked what the problem was with our doing it in 2011. I would point out to the hon. Gentleman—who, by the way, has a majority of 806, if I remember correctly, which I imagine consists of a lot of WASPI women who will remember his speech at the next election—that our report shows that the only other country in Europe that has made this level of change at this accelerated pace is Greece. As I said in the last debate, that is a country that a couple of weeks ago was teargassing pensioners who were campaigning and protesting against austerity measures. Is that really what we want to base our arguments on? Is that the kind of model we want to follow?

This has been said a million and one times in the debate, and I have been biting my tongue the whole way through because of the incredible hypocrisy and lack of knowledge on these Benches—I was going to say on the Conservative Benches, but now unfortunately I have to add the Labour shadow Minister to that. Scotland does not have the power over pensions. If anyone wants to dispute that, I suggest that they get the Scotland Act 1998 and go to section 28, and they will see that in all the reserved matters that we are entitled to top up, pensions is not included.

Even if we did have the power to create pensions, and to fix them, I tell you something—and I think I speak for my colleagues not just in this Chamber but up the road as well—we are sick to the back teeth of using taxpayers’ money to fill all the holes that this Government create: a Government with policies that we have never voted for in Scotland, that we actively rejected in the general election. We cannot be expected to plug every single hole that this Government create with their shambolic policies.

The Government now say, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) alluded to earlier, that they will never make changes to pensions unless people are within 10 years of reaching pension age. How can they justify that position but not do anything for these women, who have been told that they have to wait six or seven years to get their pensions?

The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) said that this was not in our manifesto. If he goes to page 21 of the 2016 manifesto for the Scottish elections, he will see it says that we support the WASPI campaign. He said that he would vote against our motion tonight because it is the younger generation who will pay—people in their 20s and 30s. I am included in that category, funnily enough, and I have to say that the issue is bigger than just the WASPI generation, because I want to know that when I am paying national insurance throughout my working lifetime, I am not going to be shafted at the last hurdle—that I am not going to be told at the last minute that the goalposts are moving. This is bigger. This is about the Government setting a precedent that pensions can change anywhere at any time, and that is not a healthy position for any Government to have.

The issue is altogether bigger than WASPI. The justification for the change is that we do not have enough money and this is about austerity. But the thing is that it is women that suffer under austerity. That is the reality; whether it be pensioners, single mothers or young women, it is always women that bear the brunt of this austerity.

[Alan Brown]

On affordability, is it not the case that the Government can revisit the £20 billion of tax giveaways in the last Budget—£8.5 billion in corporation tax and £5.5 billion in capital gains, inheritance tax and higher tax threshold relief? The Government can revisit those in the forthcoming spring Budget.

[Mhairi Black]

My hon. Friend makes his point very eloquently.

The Women’s Budget Group has done tremendous work. I urge Ministers to look at it and see the impact that they are having on women’s lives because of the Government’s detrimental policies. The group’s director said:

“We’ve known for some time that the poorest households and women have shouldered the greatest burden of austerity measures.”

In fact, 85% of the burden is forecast to fall on women by 2020. These women are not unfortunate casualties. They are not people who just happened to get unlucky. This Government cannot claim ignorance. They cannot plead innocence and say that they have no idea of the impact that they are about to have on people’s lives. These women, for whatever reason, are suffering under Conservative policies for no other crime than the fact that they are female and they are poor. That is the reality of what this Government are doing.

The legacy that this Government are leaving is absolutely shambolic and no amount of sympathy and flowery words from hon. Members is going to pay bills for people. It is not going to move things forward; it will not make sure that your citizens have a good, high-quality standard of life. The idea that the £8 billion spread across five years, as proposed in our report, is not affordable is an absolute joke. The national insurance fund, as we have said multiple times, will be sitting on a surplus of £30 billion. That figure has been disputed from the Government Benches, but it is worth pointing out that it comes from the Government Actuary’s Department. It is a Government figure.

In every one of these debates I have said that politics is about choice, and I have lambasted the Government for choosing to bomb Syria instead of paying pensions. I have lambasted them for spending billions on Trident. I have had a go at them for doing up this Palace of Westminster for £7 billion, which funnily enough we can afford. I understand that sometimes it can be quite dull when politicians repeat things time and again, but now there is something new. We can now also afford to pay up for the Queen’s house; we can now find the money to refurbish Buckingham Palace. So my question to the Minister would be this: are we going to be doing up Downing Street anytime soon? Are there any other houses filled with millionaires that need to be done up—that need a lick of paint? It is a ridiculous notion that we can afford to fork out money for palaces—literally, palaces such as this and Buckingham Palace—but we cannae pay pensions. It is a joke.

Our job here is to represent; it is to maintain democracy, to make sure that people watching at home feel as though they have a voice, to make sure that they feel there are people listening and standing up for them. When you see the quality of the debate that we have just sat through, no wonder people are quite depressed and disillusioned with politics. We have debated this subject five times. We have had 240 petitions all across the House. People are affected by this. Every single Member who handed in a petition has not just a professional duty but a moral duty to walk through that Lobby tonight and vote with us, because if they do not, as my WASPI mother would say, hell slap it intae ye at the next election.

Pensions Uprating (UK Pensioners Living Overseas)

Debate between Mhairi Black and Alan Brown

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) for securing this debate.

It is fair to say that, given my youthfulness, prior to last year I did not have a great understanding of pensions. But the more I look into the different issues, the more bizarre the world of pensions seems to get. I thank the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) for mentioning the fact that we are not at the WASPI meeting because we are in this Chamber debating this issue. He made an interesting point, which is in fact one reason why I find this debate incredibly bizarre. He said that the Government claim to have received legal advice that raises fears that people will be able to claim for back payments. But legal advice received by the International Consortium of British Pensioners from Blackstone Chambers contradicts that.

The Minister said that many pensioners overseas whose pensions are frozen are compensated through means-tested benefits in their country of residence and implied that unfreezing those pensions would make savings for foreign Governments at the expense of the UK taxpayer. But again, when we look at the facts, the ICBP’s recent review of the countries with the largest numbers of British pensioners with frozen pensions shows that that is simply not the case. The vast majority of pensioners would benefit greatly from an uprating in full.

That brings me to the person who my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber mentioned, Anne Puckridge, the former college lecturer, who is now 91 years of age. She worked in the UK all her life, then moved to Canada to be with her daughter and grandchildren. Fourteen years on, Anne, who served as an intelligence officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the second world war, is struggling to live on a frozen pension of £75.50, which is what she was entitled to when she moved. As my hon. Friend pointed out, she now fears that she will be forced to move back to Britain to be able to survive. He gave us some telling quotes. She has said:

“It’s the small things, and the injustice, that is really getting to me…I value my independence, but I can’t go on living on the breadline and I don’t want to inflict this on my family.”

That is telling. She is not asking for millions here—she does not want to raid the bank. She is asking for the extra 20 or 30 quid that she is entitled to after she paid into the system all her working life. Anne went on to say—this is perhaps the part that gives us most insight:

“As well as ever-increasingly poverty, I feel a sense of stress and shame, which is affecting my health.”

I looked through the various briefings on this issue and the previous debates there have been, for years now—as the Minister rightly pointed out, this debate has been going on since probably after world war two. In 1981, the line from the Government was not far off what the Minister said today. They said that they could not, unfortunately, unfreeze the pensions because that was incompatible with the Government’s policy of containing the long-term cost of the social security system to ensure that it remained affordable. This is an incredibly cynical point—I am getting used to those in here, so I thought I may as well join in—but it concerns the real lunacy of the argument about cost. Instead of giving people who have paid into the system all their life the £20 or £30 extra that people in the UK get and to which they are entitled, we are saying, “We’re not going to give you that money, but you can go and live abroad, make yourself ill through poverty, worry and the stress of having to come home. When you are forced to return to Britain, don’t worry, we’ll foot the bill for the NHS and everything else.” The argument about cost does not stand up—costs will increase when pensioners who have been made ill through stress or whatever, have to come back in order to survive.

[Alan Brown]

Yet again, my hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. Does not another nonsense argument about cost concern the reciprocal arrangement that is needed, given that Canadians in this country can get the full state pension from their country but British pensioners cannot get it in Canada? This is not about protecting social security in this country, because a reciprocal arrangement could easily be put in place. We are supposed to have the best social security system in the world, so the argument about cost is nonsense given that the Canadians can afford to pay for their citizens in this country.

[Mhairi Black]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and I will touch on our relationship with Canada in a minute. My argument is supported by a 2010 study by Oxford Economics, which used Government statistics to show that a pensioner who permanently leaves the UK saves it £4,300 a year in NHS usage and other social security benefits. We are placing an increasing workload and cost on to the NHS and other public bodies—the very bodies that we are simultaneously using as part of the argument to continue with frozen pensions. It makes no sense.

The third reason often given by the Government for this measure is that there could be some sort of legal or political backlash, but that is not the case. This issue has been debated for years, and Annette Carson made a legal challenge against the Government on the basis of discrimination. She said that because she was in South Africa, which does not have a reciprocal deal with the UK, her pension was frozen, whereas if she had moved to an EU country—or a country with such a deal—she would have had an uprated pension. The judge ruled that she lost the case and that there was no discrimination, but he noted just how ludicrous the system is, and how much confusion there is about it. He ruled that it was a political, rather than judicial, decision, which shows how crazy these plans are—the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) used that word previously.

Any pensioner who moves within the EU or the European economic area gets an increase, and the UK has reciprocal agreements with 16 countries. As the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) pointed out, our agreements with Canada, New Zealand and Australia do not allow for uprating, yet those three countries are home to 80% of overseas residents who do not receive upratings.

I agree with everything that the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) said about choice and how that has to work both ways with the Government. The Minister said that pensioners can choose whether to go to country A that has a deal, or country B that does not, but that does not add up. Surely true freedom would allow someone to choose freely where they want to go, knowing that they have paid in all their life and will now get that back. It is not for the Government to put a hindrance on where people can choose to spend the pension that they have built up over their lifetime.