New Clause 28
Pensions Bill
2:15 pm
Sally Keeble (Northampton North, Labour)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a second time.
The new clause touches on people’s inability in retirement to get the carer’s allowance—an issue that has been of great concern to my constituents, especially women. The change proposed in the new clause could be made by regulation, but it is important to debate the subject now.
I understand the reasons for saying that people on the state pension should not get carer’s allowance because it is not payment for caring, but replacement of lost earnings. As pensioners are judged not to be working, they cannot get replacement of lost earnings. That is bitterly resented both by people who have looked after their spouses for a number of years and who lose their carer’s allowance once they reach retirement age and by people looking after disabled children. I have had a number of cases of women who are looking after adult children with learning difficulties, mental health problems, or physical disabilities.
People feel a great sense of injustice. For a number of years they have cared for others. They have often given up work and made it their life’s work to look after a spouse, but suddenly when they reach retirement age they hit the buffers and their income goes down, often just at the point when the need more money. At the same time, if they have mobility impairment, they cannot get access to the mobility components of disability living allowance.
Let me give an example of someone who is particularly hard hit by this combination of factors. A woman in my constituency had spent all her working life with Barclays. She gave up work early to look after her husband, who was in very ill health. I cannot remember exactly what her benefits were, but she certainly got carer’s allowance. When she reached the pension age she lost that. At about the same time the car that she used to drive her husband to his hospital appointments broke down completely. She came to me because she could not afford to get it repaired. She had all those difficulties getting to the appointments and her income had gone down because she had lost part of her allowances. In struggling to work out what to do, it also transpired that she had very severe mobility impairment herself, because she had profound disabilities to her feet. However, she had never got that assessed and had never claimed any disability benefits, which she would almost certainly have got. Because she was also retired, she could not get those benefits, either.
The mere fact of reaching a certain age, plus the accident and the car breaking down, had turned her from being the mainstay of her family and for a neighbour who was ill as well, with a modest but reasonable level of income, to somebody whose income had gone down, who had lost her mobility, and who was completely unable to access any help from the state, purely because of her age. She resented that most bitterly.