State Retirement Pensions

Debate between Steve Webb and Yasmin Qureshi

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Ministerial Corrections

[Yasmin Qureshi]

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many people will not get a full pension as a result of any increase in the qualifying period from 30 to 35 years.

[Official Report, 25 April 2013, Vol. 561, c. 1090W.]

Letter of correction from Steve Webb:

An error has been identified in the written answer given to the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) on 25 April 2013.

The full answer given was as follows:

[Steve Webb]

The single-tier pension will require 35 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions or credits for the full amount. Based on the illustrative amount of £144 for the full single-tier pension in 2012-13 terms set out in the White Paper, 30 qualifying years under the single-tier scheme would be equivalent to a value of £123.43 a week.

Under the current state pension system, people reaching State Pension age today require 30 qualifying years for the full amount of basic State Pension currently £107.00 a week and can make contributions to the State Second Pension for each year in their working life. When the single-tier pension is implemented we will recognise contributions made under the current system and translate them into a single-tier pension foundation amount.

In the long term around 85% of people will get the full single-tier pension under the proposals outlined in the White Paper published in January. Chart 4.1 shows the proportion who will receive the full single-tier pension by the year in which people reach State Pension age. In the early years of the reforms most people receiving less than the full single-tier amount will do so because they will have a deduction applied to take into account periods when they were contracted out of the additional State Pension, rather than because they have fewer than 35 qualifying years.

The correct answer should have been:

Pensions Bill [Lords]

Debate between Steve Webb and Yasmin Qureshi

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

This is an incredibly important stage of the Bill, about which I have received hundreds of e-mails. I am sure that Members of the House from across the political divide have received e-mails specifically concerning women aged 58 and 56. We have had a number of discussions about this matter, including a Westminster Hall debate at which the Minister was present.

I know that I may sound very boring if I repeat again the concerns of those women and of Opposition Members about why this particular provision should not go through. Everyone accepts that the state pension age needs to rise in order to pay for a more generous basic state pension. This principle underpinned Labour’s Pensions Act 2007, which continued the 1995 timetable for equalising women’s state pension age with men’s by increasing it to 65 by 2020, and then legislated to increase both SPAs to 66 by 2027, to 67 by 2036 and to 68 by 2046. That was agreed and there was cross-party consensus on that.

The coalition agreement stated:

“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 man and 2020 for women.”

However, the Bill proposes an acceleration in the equalisation for women by 2018 and increases both men’s and women’s state pension age to 66 by 2020. This will hit women aged between 56 and 58 particularly hard, as they will have very little time to prepare or amend their existing plans. As has been pointed out by my colleagues countless times, those women have worked very hard in their lives but often for not very high pay, so they will not be getting very generous pensions in any event, yet they are going to be hit even harder.

The proposal will affect 4.9 million people—2.6 million women and 2.3 million men. Some 500,000 women born between 6 October 1953 and 5 March 1955 will have their state pension age delayed by more than a year, and 300,000 women born between 6 December 1953 and 5 April 1954 will have theirs delayed by 18 months exactly. For the 300,000 women facing an 18-month delay, the loss of income will be around £7,500; for those in receipt of pension credit, the figure will be closer to £11,000. That sudden and dramatic change in women’s expectations regarding their state pension age and retirement income comes with just five to seven years’ notice, which simply is not long enough for them to make adequate alternative arrangements in their retirement planning.

Women are already at a disadvantage in terms of pension provision. The median pension saving of a 56-year-old woman is just £9,100, whereas the equivalent figure for men is £52,800—almost 600% higher. It is not fair to speed up the equalisation timetable because it will hurt women disproportionately, especially those aged between 56 and 58. I know that we hear about the financial constraints, but if the Government can find £3 billion for the completely unnecessary reorganisation of the national health service, which nobody wants—we have not heard any practitioners in the medical field say that those provisions are right—are they really saying that they cannot find a bit of money for women who have worked hard for so long in their lives? The proposal is measly penny-pinching. The Government are hurting the people who are already the poorest in our society and hitting them even harder. If money can be found for the wasteful reorganisation of the NHS, I am sure money can be found for the provision to be deleted.

I urge the Minister to reconsider this aspect of the Bill and think about those women, who have worked hard all their lives. He should think for once about ordinary working people who are looking forward to some kind of pension, although they will retire later than they thought they would, and he should give them time to prepare for their pensions.

[Steve Webb]

It is a pleasure to support Government amendments 13 and 14 and to ask the House to reject amendment 1.

I welcome the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Gregg McClymont) to his new role. With due deference to the good people of Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, I hope he will forgive me if henceforth I refer to him as the hon. Member for Cumbernauld—I hope they will not take offence at that. As he knows, his predecessor, the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), to whom he referred in his speech, enjoyed a meteoric rise by shadowing me for 18 months. I hope to do the same for his career.

Before I move on to the amendments, I want to place on record my appreciation of one of the Department’s officials, Evelyn Arnold, who has worked for the Department for 36 years. I know that the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) will have enjoyed working alongside her as well. She is stepping down from a legendary career. It is not often that we pay tribute on the record to the officials who make us sound far better informed than we otherwise would, so I would like to do that formally today.

We have heard £1 billion described today as “window dressing”, “a bit of money” and “penny pinching”. That summarises the difference between opposition and government. It reminds us how we came to find ourselves borrowing £150 billion a year when £11 billion, which is the cost of amendment 1, is regarded as small change and not worth worrying too much about. When pressed about where the £11 billion would come from, the Opposition said, in effect, “We’ll find it at some point,” but there was no specific answer.

It was revealing that the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) said, “We keep being asked this question.” They keep being asked the question because they keep making unfunded promises. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor pointed out that last week’s Opposition amendment cost £20 billion. Today’s would cost another £11 billion and, as the man once said, “Soon you’re talking about serious money.”

The Government amendments are, as the Chair of the Select Committee graciously said, a huge achievement, which is to say that at a time when the public finances are, if anything—because of the global economic situation—under even more pressure than they were at the time of Second Reading back in June, to identify £1 billion is an important sign of the Government’s commitment to fairness in pension reform.