Oral Answers to Questions

Yvonne Fovargue Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)]

4. What assessment the Government have made of the equity of pension provision between men and women.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

6. What assessment the Government have made of the equity of pension provision between men and women.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Guy Opperman)]

In 2012, overall participation of female eligible employees in a workplace pension was 58%, but since the introduction of automatic enrolment this had increased to 80% in 2016. For males, this has increased from 52% to 76% in the same period.

[Guy Opperman]

The Government will not be revisiting the state pension age arrangements for women born in the 1950s who are affected by the Pensions Acts of 1995, 2007 and 2011. This would require people of working age, and more specifically younger people, to bear an even greater share of the cost of the pension system.

[Yvonne Fovargue]

The Government’s former Pensions Minister, Baroness Altmann, has said that she regrets the Government’s failure to properly communicate state pension age equalisation, an approach she described as

“a massive failure in public policy.”

Does the Minister appreciate how much this failure has affected the ability of the 1950s-born women to plan for a happy and secure retirement, and their sense of outrage about this issue?

[Guy Opperman]

Since 1995 successive Governments, including Labour Governments, have gone to significant lengths to communicate the changes, including through targeted communications, hundreds of press reports, parliamentary debates, advertising and millions of letters, and in the past 17 years the Department has also provided over 18 million personalised state pension estimates.