State Pension Age for Women Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Work and Pensions
Norman Lamb
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State Pension Age for Women
Norman Lamb Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
Let me correct the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). If he reads section 28 of the Scotland Act 2016, he will see that the Scottish Government are prohibited from doing anything about pensions or relating to age.
The key issue is communication. The Work and Pensions Committee said that people should have 15 years. The Government said, “Well, you did. It changed in 1995”. But they wasted 14 of those years by not informing women. They only started to write to women in 2009, one year before the first batch of women found that their pension age had changed. Many only discovered in 2011, when they were informed of the second change, that they were being hit by a double whammy.
The problem, as I mentioned earlier, is one of communication—an article in the Financial Times is not an acceptable way to inform women such as me, born in the 1950s, that our pension age is changing. HMRC and the DWP can certainly find us when they want to, so I would have thought they could send a personal letter. The idea that we should have to ask for our pension age is ridiculous when we have known what it was for our whole lives. The Government owe those women a duty of care; those women who have suffered the gender pay gap, raised children and cared for the sick—
Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)
Order. The right hon. Gentleman has to approach the microphone. Strictly, under the rules of the House, he should be sitting before he stands. I know it is difficult, but he has to be near a microphone.
Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)
I apologise, but he must speak into a microphone.
Norman Lamb
I am very grateful. Is it not part of the problem that all those women who have given up much of their adult lives to caring responsibilities then face real discrimination when seeking work at this age? They are therefore left in unacceptable poverty.