[Graham Stringer in the Chair] — Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 6:20 pm on 1 February 2016.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Fiona Mactaggart Fiona Mactaggart Labour, Slough 6:20, 1 February 2016

It is a pleasure to be here under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I thank WASPI and the Petitions Committee for ensuring that this subject is once again debated in the House. I hope that we get more of a response this time.

Like my hon. Friend Helen Jones, I am one of the 1950s generation who is luckily protected by the parliamentary pension scheme. I was slightly late being born, so instead of my pension being delayed until 2018, it is actually only delayed until November 2017. Jumps are inevitable when such arrangements are changed; the problem is that women need enough time to plan, and the difficulty with the 1995 changes and even more so with the more recent changes is that the time left for women to plan was inadequate.

I received a pension statement in 2005 that stated:

“Retirement may seem a long way off but thinking about it now can make a big difference to your future.”

The postscript said:

“Remember, no matter how far off retirement may be, acting today can make a big difference to your future.”

At no point did the letter tell me that my retirement was going to happen not when I was 60, but when I was closer to 64. That is the point: I am not unusual. The letter told me exactly what my basic pension entitlement would be at that year’s cash equivalent and what my additional pension would be. It was a personalised letter. It would not have been hard for the “Retirement Pension Forecasting Team” to have included a line: “and this is the date at which your retirement will happen”, but it did not. That is a case of the state letting down the citizen.

As many have said, this is a contract between the state and the citizen. We hear that the change is about equalisation, so let us talk about equality—a subject about which I am passionate. Men’s and women’s pensions are not equal. A European Union research document states that

“pensions tend to be more unequal between men and women than other forms of income”.

Women in their 50s—those of us who fought for the Equal Pay Act 1970 and discovered that it did not deliver us equal pay—have the biggest pay gap compared with men than any other age group. There are other forms of inequality: when I was secretary of the Labour party’s commission on older women, I heard many women make a point that was summed up well by one of my constituents: “We are last in the queue for a job and first in the queue for a redundancy.” That is absolutely typical for women in their 50s.

Age discrimination in employment affects women much more than men. Some interesting American research used a technique that was employed when studying race discrimination and job applications. Stating a women’s name and an age and then a man’s name and an age found that age discrimination, while present for both, is some three or four times as extreme for women. That is why we should be talking about equality. We are discussing women who have suffered more than any other group from inequality in pay and pensions.

When people talk about using new pension freedoms to deal with the problem, let us be clear that those new pension freedoms actually help those with big pension pots much more than those with small pension pots. Who has big pension pots? The guys. Who has small pension pots? The women—and they are better off hanging on to annuities than using pension freedoms, as any financial journalist will affirm.

These women are saving the state huge amounts of money. They care for their children and grandchildren and look after elderly parents. They get no recompense for that, but Government Members have the cheek to say that those are the women who should pay for the deficit. It is unacceptable. The time has come to ensure that we get real equality in pensions and that these women are not made to pay for the problem.