State Pension Age (Women)

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) for securing and opening this debate. It is perhaps an irony, however, as we are discussing pensions, that she is further from retirement age than any other Member of this House. I also want to pay a warm tribute to WASPI on its campaign and the dignity with which it has conducted it. It is a measure of the campaign’s success that every Member of this House knows the meaning of the acronym WASPI. I also pay tribute to the other groups and individuals who have been advocating the cause of women born in the 1950s.

The level of interest in this debate is summed up by the fact that we have had 26 Back-Bench contributions from Members from all parts of the United Kingdom. I want to pick out two contributions: that of my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), who has done so much work on this in recent years, and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), whose deep commitment to this is known across the House.

I also want to pay tribute to my Labour colleagues who in 2011, when the Pensions Act was going through this House, pressed the issue of transitional provisions as hard as they could. It is a shame the Government did not listen to many of our proposals set out at the time.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

At that time, the Secretary of State said in debate said he would consider transitional protection. Has my hon. Friend seen any evidence of that consideration being given?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

That points to what has happened here. In previous debates on this matter the Minister has talked about the cap on the increase being reduced from 24 to 18 months, but that was as far as it got, and we see the Government today have no positive proposals. They keep asking the Opposition about their proposals, but it is the Government whose mind has gone completely blank on this issue.

Let us not forget the fundamentals of this debate. Many women born in the 1950s will have started their working lives without even the protection of the Equal Pay Act 1970. Many of those women will have been paid at a lower rate than men for no reason other than that they were women. The gender pay gap is at its widest for many of the women under discussion today. Also, let us not forget the time that many of them took to work part-time or bring up children when they have not even had the chance to contribute to occupational pensions.

The Pensions Act 1995 increased the state pension age from 60 to 65 for women between April 2010 and 2020, to bring it into line with the state pension age for men, but the coalition Government moved the goalposts. They decided to accelerate the increase in the women’s state pension age from April 2016 so that it reached 65 by November 2018. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has pointed out, in the Second Reading debate in this House on 20 June 2011 the Secretary of State made it absolutely clear that the Government would “consider transitional arrangements.”

The much vaunted reduction in the cap—capping the maximum increase at 18 months—that the Minister has pointed to in recent debates simply is not enough. Do the Government understand the anger at the fact that more transitional provisions have not been considered—over 100,000 signatures for a debate in this House, the online campaign and the great response to it in the media? Recently I was told by the Sunday Post that a feature on this subject brings an unprecedented response from the hundreds of thousands of women who are affected.

Let us ask ourselves what the Pensions Minister in the coalition Government at the time thinks. This is what he told the Institute for Government:

“There was one very early decision that we took about state pension ages, which we would have done differently if we’d been properly briefed, and we weren’t.”

He added:

“We made a choice, and the implications of what we were doing suddenly, about two or three months later, it became clear that they were very different from what we thought.”

He then said:

“So basically we made a bad decision. We realised too late. It had just gone too far by then.”

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

The only thing my hon. Friend has forgotten to mention is that the whole idea was masterminded and put forward at the Dispatch Box by that tin-pot Liberal who called himself Professor Steve Webb.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I am honoured to be put right by that intervention, and perhaps the Professor, as we shall forever refer to him, would have been better off listening to my colleagues on the Labour Benches than the civil servants.

It would be even more interesting to ask ourselves what the current Pensions Minister thinks of the 2011 Act. I thoroughly recommend to the House rosaltmann.com, which has a lot of wonderful critiques of the coalition pensions policy in it. She cannot deny it is her site; her photograph is on every contribution. She said this about the 2011 Act:

“The Government has decided to renege on its Coalition Agreement, by increasing the State Pension Age for women from 2016, even though it assured these women that it would not start raising the pension age again before 2020.”

That is what the current Minister for Pensions said. Even after the concession of the cap being reduced, this is what she said to the Yorkshire Post on 6 June 2013:

“The coalition seems oblivious to the problems faced by those already in their late fifties, particularly women, who feel they simply do not matter to policymakers.”

What an appropriate critique that is!

We should also look carefully at the intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) who talked about being lobbied by the Pensions Minister about applying the pensions protection fund retrospectively. Her lobbying of my right hon. Friend was effective on that occasion. She told him that the impossible was possible. Now, however, she says that what we are trying to achieve is impossible. I have an interest in history, and I have been trying—unsuccessfully—all morning to think of an example of another Minister who had more influence on Government policy when they were outside the Government than when they were in it.

We have heard much about the key question of notice. It is key because the Government have in their gift the pensions legal framework in this country, and when they make changes to it, they have a duty to provide notice of them. The House should not just take my word for that; let us take the word of the Pensions Minister. What did she say about women who were already in their late 50s and about the notice they were given under the 2011 Act? She said:

“They are not being given enough notice of such a huge change.”

Why will she not listen to her own words now?

This debate is taking place against the backdrop of a decision in the district court in the northern Netherlands, which has already been mentioned today. It found that a lady who suffered from a number of chronic, progressive diseases faced a disproportionate burden in bridging the gap to her extended retirement age. How awful it would be if this battle were to end up in the courts, given that the Government have the chance to do something about it today. The Government keep saying that they are not sure what to do. They find it impossible to do anything about this, and they have no proposals to bring forward. Yet if we look at the passage of the Pensions Act 2011, we can see that they had a number of options at that time, one of which has been set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) today. Another, which was put forward by one of my predecessors as shadow Pensions Minister, related to maintaining the qualifying age for pension credit on the 1995 timetable rather than the 2011 one, which would at least have provided a buffer for those who were least able to cope financially with the changes. That proposal was completely dismissed at the time.

I ask the Minister at least to open his mind to having a discussion about what might be done, instead of consistently hiding behind the fact that he is going to do absolutely nothing. We have today heard the passion around this issue, and it is not an issue that is going to go away. I urge the Government to be constructive. They could still do something to ease the transitions. Whatever the Minister does today, he should not slam the door in the face of the 1950s women.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vara]

I will not give way.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

rose—

[Mr Vara]

I will give way.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I am grateful to the Minister for being so generous in giving way. He read out the quote about £1 billion being a “serious amount of money”, but he really should have quoted the whole sentence, which begins:

“this was a measure to save 30 billion quid over how many years, and we wanted 10% of that back to soften the blow”.

Steve Webb wanted £3 billion back but got only £1 billion.

[Mr Vara]

If the hon. Gentleman had taken the trouble to listen while he was preparing his question, he would know that that is what I said, except that I used different words. He might want to check the Hansard record tomorrow morning. In this place, it always helps to listen before speaking.

The Government listened to the concerns expressed during the passing of the 2011 Act, and shortened the delay that anyone would experience in claiming their state pension, relative to the 1995 timetable, to 18 months. That concession benefited almost a quarter of a million women, who would otherwise have experienced delays of up to two years. A similar number of men also benefited from a reduced increase. The concession was worth £1.1 billion in total, and as a result 81% of women affected will experience a delay of 12 months or less.