State Pension: Women born in the 1950s

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I do not wish to make lengthy remarks. This is a very important debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) on securing it. Brentwood and Ongar is the most beautiful constituency in the world, but North Ayrshire and Arran has a chance of being called the second best.

This issue has affected a number of women in my constituency since I was elected last year. I very much understand what they have been through, but I would like to set out my thinking on the subject in the context of how we have arrived where we have.

In 1995, the then Government decided to equalise the state pension age for men and women to address long-standing inequality. That change was part of a wider social trend towards gender equality, but was also a decision that arose partly from European law and equality law cases relating to occupational pension provision. The last Labour Government, between 1997 and 2010, continued the policy and additionally determined that a state pension age of 65 could not be sustained for very much longer. That was the thinking that led to the Pensions Act 2007, which raised the state pension age to 66, 67 and then 68.

Under the stewardship of the former Member for Thornbury and Yate, an excellent Pensions Minister, the coalition Government introduced additional reforms in the Pensions Act 2011, which brought in a number of highly important reforms—not least auto-enrolment, which has benefited many people across all of our constituencies—and sought to address a growing imbalance. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who was then Secretary of State, said at the time:

“Back in 1926, when the state pension age was first set, there were nine people of working age for every pensioner. The ratio is now 3:1 and is set to fall closer to 2:1 by the latter half of the 21st century. Some of these changes can be put down to the retirement of the baby boomers, but it is also driven by consistent increases in life expectancy. The facts are stark: life expectancy at 65 has increased by more than 10 years since the 1920s, when the state pension age was first set. The first five of those years were added between 1920 and 1990. What is really interesting is that the next five were added in just 20 years, from 1990 to 2010.”—[Official Report, 20 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 45.]

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

My predecessor as MP for Ipswich is reported to have characterised the demands of the WASPI women as “intergenerational theft”. Will the hon. Gentleman dissociate himself from that comment?

[Alex Burghart]

I feel that the hon. Gentleman has achieved his purpose by putting such a claim on record. I am not aware of his predecessor having made such remarks and I am not aware of the context, so he will forgive me if I do not comment on them, although I am sure that he did not really make that intervention to get my response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) on securing this debate. She has been a stalwart in speaking out for the WASPI women. I was very happy to be a co-signatory to her request to the Backbench Business Committee for this debate, and I am happy to add my support.

I know that I speak for so many others when I say that my constituents in Strangford were gutted to find that no change has been made to the nefarious decision to deny women their hard-earned pension. An email I received said that there was a sense of

“despair amongst our WASPI women with increasingly negative effects on mental and physical health and catastrophic financial situations.”

I cannot underline enough those women’s mental and physical health and their catastrophic financial situations. The people I have spoken to are greatly affected by those three things.

It is little wonder that those women feel like that when it appears that the political route has led nowhere. The Bill supported by the all-party group on state pension inequality for women has been kicked into the long grass. For that reason, the WASPI women have, alongside their political campaign, been progressing on the legal front. They believe that proving that the DWP failed in its duty and committed maladministration is the most cost-effective and quickest way for the 3.8 million women affected by the changes to the state pension age in the Pensions Acts of 1995, 2007 and 2011 to achieve justice and recompense.

I am aware that the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has begun his preliminary inquiry. He is starting with the 1995 Act and is looking at whether the DWP failed in its duty to inform women of the significant change to state pension age, which had been 60 for women since 1948. If he finds that the DWP failed in its duty and committed maladministration, he should make recommendations about what the Government should do to make amends. That would be an important way of addressing these issues. Those recommendations should perhaps include recompense for the losses suffered by all women adversely affected by the changes.

It is time that we did the right thing for those women. In my constituency alone, 5,800 women have been adversely affected. I am not saying that every one of them has come and spoken to me, but a great proportion have. They worked their fingers raw and had their end goal in sight, but the certainty of a pension was removed from them with very little notice. They did not have the ability to change the course of their financial future. They were told the facts of the case and were left to deal with it. The women who have spoken to me include not only civil servants who planned their financial future and are now cast into uncertainty, in doubt about how their well-deserved retirement will pan out, but women who have literally scrubbed on their hands and knees. They are saying, “Jim, I don’t know how I can physically do this anymore.”

[Sandy Martin]

The point is not just that those people worked hard all their lives and then suddenly found that their pension age had been increased, but that they were not given the time to plan their lives in advance. In many cases, they finished work and found that they would not get their pension for years afterwards.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. They thought they had planned for their pension age, but suddenly found that it was grasped away from them at the last moment. The impact on women throughout Northern Ireland is incredible. I have said this before, and I will keep on saying it: we need to do the right thing. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran said that we must do the right thing. I am here to do the right thing and make sure it happens.

This equalisation was initially brought about in 1995, when an EU directive prompted the Government to equalise retirement age for men and women—then 65 and 60 respectively. The Government chose to level it at 65, and it was decided to increase women’s SPA in stages between 2010 and 2020. Women born in 1950-51 would retire at 61, those born in 1952-53 would retire at 62 and so on until 65 was reached for all post-1955 women in 2020.

I am unsure how we got to the stage at which we are asking women to work into their 70s and beyond. People are working longer, but they will not live longer if we make them work longer. I believe that enough is enough. I am not alone in that view. I read an article—the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran referred to it—that said:

“A United Nations independent expert has affirmed the stance taken by campaign groups including the Women Against State Pension Inequality…that certain women have been affected disproportionately by recent pension age changes.”

We cannot ignore the United Nations—we often refer to it.

“Philip Alston’s report Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom on extreme poverty and human rights, out on Friday (16 November), showed the number of pensioners living in poverty in the UK had risen by 300,000 to 16 per cent in the four years to 2016/17. This was despite measures such as the triple lock guarantee. But he found a group of women born in the 1950s had been particularly impacted a ‘poorly phased in’ change in the state pension age.

Mr Alston said: ‘As was made clear to me in a number of submissions and through powerful personal testimony, a group of women born in the 1950s have been particularly impacted by an abrupt and poorly phased in change in the state pension age from 60 to 66.

The impact of the changes to pensionable age is such as to severely penalise those who happen to be on the cusp of retirement and who had well-founded expectations of entering the next phase of their lives”—

as the hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) said—

“rather than being plunged back into a workforce for which many of them were ill-prepared and to which they could not reasonably have been expected to adjust with no notice.’”