Unauthorised Overdrafts

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Yvonne Fovargue

Wednesday 8th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered fees and charges on unauthorised overdrafts.

Overdrafts are one of the most widely used credit products in the market. Almost three in 10 people in the UK with personal current accounts have been overdrawn in the past year. Overdrafts can be a flexible form of borrowing, and most people use theirs for only a couple of months in the year. However, a significant minority of people—around 10%—are much more frequent users and regularly go overdrawn for nine months or more each year. There are also people who regularly go over their overdraft limit and are hit by exorbitant and disproportionate charges. The major banks make more than £1 billion per year from charges on unauthorised overdrafts—the majority, according to the head of the Competition and Markets Authority, from financially vulnerable customers.

StepChange Debt Charity estimates that 1.7 million people in the UK are trapped in an overdraft cycle and consistently use overdrafts to meet essential and emergency costs. For many vulnerable customers who are already struggling, regularly having to go into an overdraft or over an overdraft limit can lead to and exacerbate financial difficulties. Many hard-working families live constantly on their overdrafts, and those in chronic financial difficulties often face impossible choices between meeting the costs of essential bills and going further overdrawn or over their overdraft limit. Those people can struggle to get out of their overdrafts, as fees and interest build up over time and make it increasingly difficult to get out of the red. Those households are also more likely to be on the edge of their overdrafts, and if they go over, they face substantial and punitive charges that push them into difficulties. If people do not have the means to get out of their unarranged overdrafts, that can lead to persistent charges, which make it successively harder for them to avoid financial difficulties each month.

Last year, StepChange surveyed its clients with overdraft debt to explore their experiences of overdraft charges. It found that people with overdraft debt who contact the charity regularly go into the red. On average, those people had been in an unarranged overdraft for 11 of the past 12 months. Almost two thirds—62%—of the people StepChange helps with overdraft debt regularly exceed their arranged overdraft limit as they struggle to make ends meet; they did so on average in five of the past 12 months. Borrowers face average charges of £45 a time for slipping into an unauthorised overdraft. That adds up to a massive £225 a year of unauthorised overdraft charges on average.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the cap on payday lending has actually worked quite well and stopped unaffordable charges, so in its review of high-cost credit, the Financial Conduct Authority should look at introducing a similar cap on overdraft charges and more affordable ways of paying down debt?

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend has done a lot of work in this area, both as a Member of Parliament and before she came to this place, and she is absolutely right. I will come on to the difference between caps on overdraft charges and those on payday lending.

Research published today by Which? found that consumers needing as little as £100 could be charged up to £156 more by some major high street banks than the Financial Conduct Authority allows payday loan companies to charge when lending the same amount for the same period. For example, Which? compared the cost of borrowing £100 for 30 days and found that some high street banks’ unarranged overdraft charges were as much as seven and a half times higher than the maximum charge of £24 on a payday loan for the same period. And because bank overdraft charges apply to monthly billing periods, not the number of days money is borrowed for, consumers who need £100 could pay up to £180 in fees if they borrow over two calendar months from their high street bank in the form of an unarranged overdraft.

State Pension Age (Women)

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Yvonne Fovargue

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this debate on such an important and unjust matter and on her early-day motion 1402, which has secured 138 signatures from across all the main parties.

I also congratulate Age UK on the campaign that it has been running. Those of us who get the tube to work in the morning and come up the escalators and into Portcullis house will have seen the posters that adorn the walls. They tell the stories of some of the women who will be affected by these changes. Some of those stories have been related by hon. Members from all parties this morning.

My hon. Friend spoke about some of the organisations that have provided support on this matter, such as Age UK, which I have already mentioned, and Saga. There have also been supportive articles in the Daily Mail and The Guardian. There is a broad coalition against the proposal, and we hope that the Government will take on board some of criticisms of the Pensions Bill, especially of clause 1 and the increase in the state pension age.

People who are approaching retirement say, “This is a bit like a horizon. You can always see it in the distance, but you can never quite get to it.” As my hon. Friends the Members for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) and for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) have said, the goalposts just keep moving, and that does not seem fair, especially when people are trying to make the right decisions. They plan, contribute, bring up families and care for relatives, yet they are being penalised.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with my constituent who said that she felt discriminated against when she started work 30 years ago because she was barred from joining a personal pension scheme? She feels discriminated against now because of her date of birth and the fact that her pension will be delayed.

[Rachel Reeves]

I could not agree more. That is a big issue and one that I will address later. For a number of reasons, this group of women are particularly ill-equipped to deal with the changes that the Government are trying to force upon them.

I want to pick up on a couple of points raised by the hon. Members for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) and for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke). The proposals go against the coalition agreement, which states:

“The parties agree to…hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.”

These changes bring forward the equalisation of the state pension age to 2018, which is not mentioned in the coalition agreement, and they raise the state pension age for women to 66 in 2018—two years earlier than promised in the agreement.

Although there is increasing pressure on the Liberal Democrats to stick with the coalition agreement, there is no obligation on the Minister to support this breach or for coalition MPs to vote for it. No one in the country voted for this at the general election a year ago, and it is not what coalition MPs signed up to when they made their promises in the rose garden. We have heard a great deal from Liberal Democrat Members today. I hope that that means that people who are approaching retirement can feel that their MPs will not support these proposals.

To reiterate points that have already been made, 2.6 million women and 2.3 million men will have to wait longer for their state pension than they previously had been told. Some 500,000 women will have a delay of a year before they get their pensions and about 300,000 women will have a delay of 18 months or more. Unfortunately, 33,000 women who were born between early March and early April 1954 will have to wait another two years before they receive their state pension. I have been lobbied by a huge number of women on these issues, not least by my own mother who was born on 30 March 1954. She very much hopes that the Minister will be listening to every word that I say today.

There is fewer than five years’ notice before these changes take effect. The Turner report says that people should be given at least 15 years’ notice, and the Pensions Policy Institute believes that these changes do not give enough notice. Women need longer to prepare for changes in the state pension age because they tend to become part-time workers sooner than men of the same age.

As of April 2011, the basic state pension is worth £102.15 a week. Pension credit is worth £137.35 a week. Those women who are seeing a delay in their state pension age of two years face a loss of pension income of more than £10,000. For those in receipt of pension credit, that loss is closer to £15,000. That does not take into account the passported benefits that come along with a pension.

Longevity is increasing and Members from all parts of the House welcome that, but we cannot move the goalposts every time an actuary changes his forecast. Six months before the election, the Minister himself said:

“Pension policy needs to be stable and predictable years ahead, not made up on the back of a cigarette packet.”

I agree with the Minister. Although his words are still on his website, he is now making policy up on the back of that cigarette packet and it is hitting women particularly hard. Indeed, the recently published Green Paper on the flat rate pension consults on reasoned mechanisms for increasing the state pension age, which is a recognition of the unfairness that is being imposed on women by the Pensions Bill, which is just about to come to the House. That Green Paper does not include consultation on arbitrary changes with five years’ notice. The reason that it does not consult on those types of changes is because the Minister, his Department and the Government know that they are unfair. So why is he forcing them upon women who are 56 or 57 years old?

My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central talked about the savings of women who are 56 or 57. There is something particularly perverse about targeting that specific group, because those women who are 56 or 57 now have average pension savings of £9,100, compared to the average pension savings of men of the same age of £52,800. At retirement, pension savings of £9,100 work out at £564 a year or £11 a week. The reasons for the difference in the average pension savings of men and women are varied, but the key point is that these women I am talking about are not in a financial position to absorb the changes being proposed at such short notice.

These women have earned far less during their lives than men of the same age. In 1980, the gender pay gap was 28.5%. When these women were in their 20s, they were earning on average almost 30% less than men of the same age. The gender pay gap has been closing since 1980 and it is now about 16%, but the point is that these women have suffered inequality throughout their working lives. They now face a double whammy and are paying the price for getting us there too quickly.

In addition, a lot of these women have worked part-time at some point in their life, particularly when they were bringing up children. In fact, many of them are also working part-time now, to help to care for elderly parents or grandchildren. As other Members have said already, these women are the big society. They are doing the caring work that we value as much as their work in the workplace. Of course, many of them have also had interrupted careers and have not paid full national insurance contributions. The Minister’s own Department estimates that women are entitled to receive £30 less in their basic state pension than men. All those points show that these women are more reliant on the state pension than their male equivalents, first because they have much lower private occupational pension savings and secondly because they are in not such a good position as men to increase their savings in the next five years.