BMA (Contract Negotiations)
Debate between Philippa Whitford and Helen Jones(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Ben Gummer
I will not give way to the hon. Member for Warrington North. I give way to the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire.
Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women
Debate between Philippa Whitford and Helen Jones(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Helen Jones
I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend, and I will come to that point later.
As I said, the problem was recognised by many people at the time of the 2011 Act. My hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce), who has a great deal of expertise in this area, moved amendments that would have protected women born between October 1953 and April 1955 from waiting more than an extra year for their state pension.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
Is it not also the case, as several of my constituents have said, that these changes compounded measures in the 1995 Act of which women were not informed? One lady said that until she got a letter saying, “You are no longer retiring at 64, but at 66,” she knew nothing about the fact that there had been a change, so for her the difference is six years.
Helen Jones
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Again, I will come on to that point a bit later.
Part of the problem in 2011 was that the Government did not seem to understand the implications of their own Bill. When the former Pensions Minister gave an interview to the Institute for Government after the 2015 election, he said, somewhat ungrammatically, I think, but fairly clearly:
“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.”
I have known a few Ministers in my time who did not seem to understand the implications of their own Bills, but this was a former Pensions Minister—an acknowledged expert on social security—who did not understand what was going to happen. If he did not understand the position, how on earth could he expect the many thousands of affected women to understand it?