Widowed Parent’s Allowance

Debate between Patricia Gibson and Liz Saville Roberts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the widowed parent’s allowance.

It is a great pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Moon. I felt compelled to call for this debate about the marital status requirements of widowed parent’s allowance and the need to update the eligibility criteria of its successor, bereavement support payment, following contact by parents affected by the loss of partners. I wish especially to raise the case of Mr Arwel Pritchard and his family.

I have known Arwel, a police officer, since he was in my class in the sixth form at Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor. He met his partner, Donna, whom I also taught, while they both studied there. They were together from then until her untimely death. She leaves two young sons, Cian and Danial. The letter Arwel wrote to me 11 days after Donna’s death is heartbreaking, and his justifiable anger at the callousness with which he and his children have been treated deserves to be put on the record. If I may, I will read some of his words. He wrote:

“On the 20^th of May 2018 the mother of my children and my long term partner Donna Claire McClelland passed away following a long illness with breast cancer.

She had been my partner since the time we met in college approximately 24 years ago.

During our time together we got engaged but, due to financial constraints, we did not get married as we had to make the difficult decision either to purchase a home together or get married. Wanting to raise a family, we decided to buy a house in order that we could have a home for our children.

The decision was made to become home owners, and, due to the inflated cost of living and the pay freeze that I received at work, we were never able to afford to be married.

Why am I—a person who has been a lifelong partner to Donna, who has two children with Donna and who has been in a relationship and living with Donna for more years than she lived with her parents—why am I treated as nothing in the eyes of the government?

Why am I treated differently to a person who could afford or was willing to get into debt to be married?

Why are my children not going to receive bereavement benefit for their loss just because their mother and father were not able to get married?

Why is the government discriminating against unmarried people?

Why is the government discriminating against people from different social backgrounds?

Why are children punished financially when one of their parents dies, just because their parents were unable to afford to get married?”

I am proud to be able to put those words on the record.

In many ways, widowed parent’s allowance has been around in one form or another since the inception of the modern welfare state. Society recognises that the death of either parent causes great trauma in a family and seeks to alleviate that distress with financial support. But although the names and conditions of bereavement support payments to widowed families have evolved since the days of Beveridge and Attlee, the requirement for widowed parents to be in a legally licensed relationship —either married or in a civil partnership—is a throwback to the social mores of the 1940s.

The Beveridge report of 1942 acknowledged, in a very different social context, the “problem” of unmarried couples being discriminated against, but none the less recommended limiting widow and guardian benefits to

“the legal wife of the dead man.”

That principle has remained enshrined in certain aspects of our social security system ever since.

That discrimination on the grounds of marital status was challenged in Northern Ireland by Siobhan McLaughlin, whose appeal was ultimately backed by the UK Supreme Court last summer. Ms McLaughin’s partner, John Adams, died in 2014. The couple were not married, but they had lived together for 23 years. At the time of his death, the couple had four children, aged between 11 and 19. The late Mr Adams had made sufficient contributions for Ms McLaughlin to be able to claim widowed parent’s allowance had she been married to him. The Supreme Court ruled by a majority of four to one that denying those payments to Ms McLaughlin was incompatible with article 14, in conjunction with article 8, of the European convention on human rights. Its judgment also sets out incompatibility with articles 2 and 3 of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child.

Essentially, the Court reasoned that although the promotion of marriage and civil partnerships as a policy goal is a legitimate aim for any Government, denying Ms McLaughlin and her children the benefit of Mr Adams’s contributions simply because they were not married was not a proportionate means of achieving that policy goal. In other words, privileging marriage and civil partnerships with tax breaks is one thing, but denying money to grieving children simply because they come from unmarried households is quite another. I say “children” quite intentionally.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady is making a very eloquent case for children who are punished because their parents chose, for whatever reason, not to get married. Does she agree that the entire bereavement support regime introduced in April 2017 punishes all children, because some families with children lose up to £12,000 a year under the new system—working-age parents with children may lose up to £23,500 a year on average—despite this being a contributory benefit?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Indeed. It interests me that the Supreme Court judgment makes reference to article 2 of the UN convention on the rights of the child, which decrees non-discrimination in relation to children, and to article 3, which endorses Governments’ working for the best interests of the child first and foremost. Those principles apply not just to the matter we are debating but to other issues.

Nuclear Decommissioning Industry: Pensions

Debate between Patricia Gibson and Liz Saville Roberts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered pensions in the nuclear decommissioning industry.

I have been seeking to secure a debate on pensions in the nuclear decommissioning industry for some months, as I am deeply disturbed by the way workers have been treated and betrayed by the UK Government. I speak on behalf of those in my constituency of North Ayrshire and Arran who work on the Hunterston A site, but this matter is of material interest to all workers across the United Kingdom who share the sense of betrayal and treachery at the fact that their pensions have been treated as if they were of no account.

[Mr Philip Hollobone in the Chair]

The betrayal that those workers feel should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed events since the nuclear estate was privatised by the Thatcher Government in the 1980s. Guarantees were made requiring the new private sector employers to continue to provide pension benefits for those employed at the time of privatisation

“at least as good as those they were receiving in the public sector”.

Those guarantees and legal protections have now been abandoned.

That situation was made starkly clear by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and other employers consulting on reforms to two final salary schemes, seeking the views of members on changes such as moving to a career average, revalued earnings arrangement and a cap on pensionable pay. The UK Government decided that because the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is classified as public sector, those schemes should be reformed under the Public Service Pensions Act 2013. Clearly, however, those pensions are not public sector ones, as I shall go on to make clear.

The erosion of decommissioning workers’ pensions is unacceptable. Radical reform of those pensions has already taken place in the mid-2000s, when they were closed to new entrants, who now have inferior defined-contribution pensions. Public sector reform takes no account of the fact that decommissioning sites are now in the private sector, nor that, unlike for other public sector workers, redundancy is an inherent part of decommissioning workers’ employment.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. Pension rights in the event of redundancy are particularly important for workers undertaking decommissioning at Trawsfynydd power station in my constituency because of the timescale for closure and the age profile of the workforce. I hope she agrees that we need a commitment from the Minister in her response that a solution will be found for employees of Magnox Ltd and other companies affected by the Enterprise Act 2016.