Pensions Bill [HL]

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, make a persuasive case, but I would refer to it as a persuasive case in an ideal world. First, no alternative way of saving the present value sum of £10 billion has been offered. Secondly, the real priority is to move to a much better state pension at 70—as many noble Lords have commented, entailing an acceleration in the increase of the retirement age. I was interested, turning on the radio in my car the other day, to hear various people in their mid-50s being interviewed who all said that they expected to work until 70 as a matter of course. Perhaps people are somewhat ahead of the two legislatures.

I cannot deny that there is an apparent unfairness here but, without giving offence, I hope, I point out that my wife was one of the lucky ones in getting a state pension at 60—she was just on the cusp, whereas a lot of her friends had to wait a lot longer—but I do not get one until 65 although I am likely to live two and half years less than her. Historically there has been enormous unfairness in the provision of state pensions regarding men and women. Men, who lived shorter, had to wait longer for their pensions. That is going to be ended as pensions are brought into line and made the same for both sexes, but I do not think that I ever heard people complaining on behalf of men that they were getting an unfair deal in relation to women.

One has to accept the idealistic fairness of the case, but £10 billion has to be raised and the priority for all of us is to move towards a much better pension for all at 70. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, pointed out, for the many women who will continue to work, whether to 65, 70 or 75, this will not have a huge effect; it will have a bigger effect on those women not in a position to do so. It is potentially better to deal with that problem by means of the welfare reforms that are going through than to delay the bringing together—or, in fact, the acceleration—of the retirement ages for men and women.

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, I support the idea that these changes to the pension age are going too fast. There was a successful film recently called “Made in Dagenham”, which helped to bring home to a new generation of women how much the gender equality gap had changed. It pointed up the distance that women have come today from what they called the bad old days of discrimination. Look at us today, the film said; we enjoy much greater equality, and now we have the law on our side to back us up. Barbara Castle featured in the film, brilliantly played, and she was feisty in her defence of equality for women. The film assumed that the audience who saw it would feel that the story was complete and that equality was an accepted part of our society.

Therefore, it is sad to see a necessary piece of legislation going through that harps on the idea that women will just have to put up with this new piece of discrimination. Half the population of this country are highly tuned to notice what happens to women and the disadvantages that are placed on their lives. Women have more complicated lives than men, as we know; they take time out to have children, to nurse older people and to create stable households—an ideal that I know the Government hold precious. Women therefore need consideration in the pattern of their lives that the amendment seeks to improve.

Bringing in this change to the pension age is extremely important; it is evident that we are an ageing population and we will all of us have to work longer. It is the method by which we bring that about that calls for nuance. Nobody is challenging the fact that we are getting older. Nobody is challenging the fact that, as the noble Lord said, men have been disadvantaged. We do not want them to be disadvantaged; we want people to be treated fairly and equally, and we want gender-free legislation.

This legislation is not gender-free. It cannot be said too often. My colleagues on these Benches have said so already. Listen to the numbers: one-third of a million women will see their state pension age rise by 18 months. Thirty-three thousand will see it increase by two years. It is not just those women who are affected by this but their children, families, neighbours and other women. Women are very aware of legislation that goes against them. It is unfair—we can see that it is. Women are being penalised out of the blue because the Government are rushing forward with pension proposals that need slower and fairer introduction.

One of the Government’s flagship aspirations is to get people to show a greater personal responsibility. That is an excellent thing but how can people do that—how can they plan for their old age, which will take a lot of complicated financial arranging as people live far longer—in so short a time? Indeed, as people age and begin to look forward to their retirement, they formulate attitudes towards it that are hard to change. They see it coming towards them; they make allowances for the time it will give them to look after their own, by now very aged, parents. They may feel they deserve to see a reward coming towards them for a life of hardship and trouble. I know people feel this because they write to me, as they do to my fellow Peers. They complain in their letters that it is an outrage.

This is not a matter of discrimination that will go on in the way that the film showed discrimination operating in the 1960s and 1970s and earlier. We know that this is a transition and one that is important. Of course we have to move to a fairer system. We will all work to 70 and things will eventually come right. However, is it legitimate to see them coming right at the expense of a group of poor and disadvantaged women, who somehow have to be sacrificed on the altar of this speedy operation? In this case there is an alternative.

[Baroness Hollins]

My Lords, I, too, am concerned about what the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, described as disproportionate disadvantage. I am concerned about women, the great carers in our society—the people who care about the members of their family who are perhaps more vulnerable or dependent and need extra support. They are the people who, because they care so much, are willing to give up their time and perhaps work part-time. I belonged for a period to the Standing Commission on Carers. A survey was reported to the standing commission in its first year which found that the vast majority of family carers are indeed women. It found that when women care, they are more likely to work part-time or give up their occupation, and that men who cared did so extremely well but for fewer hours. Caring was much less likely to impact on their employment hours.

This change is being made too quickly and comes too soon. I acknowledge that, on the face of it, women live longer and that it is perhaps anomalous that their current pension age is lower. Yesterday I met the carers’ forum at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It was made up of 12 people who represent carers of sons, daughters, partners and elderly parents with different mental health conditions. Some cared for somebody in their family with a learning disability or autism. The majority of them were women. I asked them how this change, and the speed of this change, would affect people in their position. They represent carers of people with mental health conditions, and they made some very important points quite forcibly.

They said that pension equality is fine, but that perhaps it should come into effect when society is more equal—when women start getting equal pay and occupational pensions, and particularly when men begin to share the caring burden more equally. They support the right of carers to work; they recognise the role of work as respite. They wanted me to stress the importance of not underestimating the effect on carers of a rapid change in their pensionable age when they might have made decisions about caring and occupation in anticipation of an earlier pension age. They talked about the need for health and strength to be an effective carer and the insidious nature of caring—the way in which it can lead to so much tiredness and often depression. They said: “Adrenalin keeps us going when we are caring. But sometimes when our caring responsibilities end, that is the moment when we ourselves begin to experience health problems which we have been storing up during those caring years”.

These are people who have saved the country huge amounts of money through giving up their own occupation and their own time to care and support more vulnerable members of their families. I appreciate that, in a good carers strategy, it might well be that welfare reform will attend to carers’ needs. What they would have liked as carers is a flexible pension that took account of individual need rather than assuming the same age was right for everybody. However, I support these amendments. The speed of change is too rapid particularly for this very vulnerable group, who represent a significant number of people if it is true that as many as a sixth of this particular age group are at the moment affected or carers, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, suggested.

Pensions Bill [HL]

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, I want to contribute to this debate about the Pensions Bill from an entirely different angle. I have listened with fascination to, and taken note of, the forensic analysis of its clauses. I declare an interest; for almost two years, I was the government-appointed voice of older people. In that time I received hundreds of letters, and it is those voices that I bring with me to the Chamber. I regret to say that I did not have many letters of complaint from the judiciary.

The terrible news this morning from Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, which detailed the shocking treatment of old people in some national health hospitals, indicates the need for a total rethink of how we regard the old. We all know that populations are ageing. We should celebrate that fact as it is a major achievement in human development. Advances in medicine and hygiene, and the triumph of lifestyle changes such as the decline in smoking, have converged to make a major change in my life expectancy and that of everyone else. The human race is living longer. By 2050 the number of people around the planet over 65 will have doubled. This change is on a par with climate change, and will interact with climate change to shape the future of life on this planet.

Rather than see the phenomenon as a wretched burden on society, we should welcome the old as a major new resource: an extra generation fit enough to work longer and contribute to the economy that supports them, as well as a major market for new technologies and services that promote well-being, independence and social interaction. That is the good news.

The bad news, which today's report on old people's health endorses, is that we are far from seeing the old as valuable, often capable and willing to work, planning carefully for what they expect their retirement to bring, and deserving of the same dignity and respect as the rest of society. From now on, issues concerning the old—their employment, housing, social care and transport—will come for consideration before your Lordships again and again. The planning of pension provision is merely a very important and leading adjustment that all of us will have to make to these sensational changes.

It is important that we get the emphasis and the attitude right from the start. The default retirement age is already on the way out. If older people wish—and many do—they may stay in work for as long as they are able and needed. They will be needed. The economy cannot support a population most of whom spend one-third of their lives in state-supported retirement. Planning must be overarching. Let us consider the numbers. In May last year, nearly 12.5 million people were claiming state pensions. The UK spends 5 per cent of its GDP on pension benefits, which is less than most other countries in Europe.

The names of Lloyd George and Beveridge have bounced around the Chamber today. William Beveridge advised Lloyd George on the first old-age pensions. Your Lordships will remember that when later he advised on national insurance in 1942, he listed the then five great evils: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Times have changed. If Beveridge were to come back and address issues facing the old, he might well suggest five new giant evils. I believe that they are poverty, isolation, discrimination, injustice and neglect. Three of those considerations converge in the provisions of this Bill: discrimination, poverty and injustice. We would do well to consider them closely, for they will occur again as we struggle to deal with the unprecedented social change that is upon us.

On discrimination, 25 years after the Equal Pay Act, whose intentions we now know have not been fully realised, I little thought to find women confronting a brand new form of discrimination. I thought that the public will had moved on and that the very suggestion that such a new discrimination could happen would be howled out of court. Yet such discrimination exists in accelerating the extended pension age to 66 by 2018 in the interests of righting another discrimination, which we acknowledge existed when women were allowed to retire at 60 and men had to wait until 65. That was discrimination and we are pleased to see it go, but not when another discrimination is brought in to make it possible.

We know why this arises, and it is very understandable. It arises because the trajectory of a woman’s life differs from that of a man’s. It almost cannot be otherwise. For the best of all possible reasons—reasons applauded by society—women who are now in their fifties took a break from their working/earning lives to bring up their children. Society applauds such a move. It required their making financial sacrifices at the time, but those sacrifices were made willingly and within their own capacity to plan and anticipate their family finances. The Bill penalises them for doing that. It confronts them with having to wait longer than they thought before they get their pension and with little time or resource to do so. It is not just women who recognise that as discriminatory.

The next great evil facing the old is poverty on a very wide scale. A higher proportion of women in the workforce have low-earning jobs. Pensioners from black and ethnic groups are more likely to be in poverty than white pensioners. Forty-nine per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi pensioners already live in poverty. Many women, as we have heard, struggle to do several jobs over the same schedule in order to provide for their families: their existing earnings are at a stretch. They may well be caring for both a younger generation—their own children—and an older one, their ageing parents. They are caught in a generational bind. Yet some of them—33,000, according to the Minister’s own figures—face the sudden prospect of needing to fund up to a two-year delay in their entitlement to a state pension. They must wonder how they are to do that and how that situation arose. There is no scope, no space, no time and no opportunity to earn a little more or to set even a little aside each week to ease that transition. They face the gentle but implacable squeeze of poverty. Up to 2.6 million women will be affected by the additional time they have to wait for their state pension.

The third evil is injustice. Many of the old are already seized by a fear of what lies ahead. They sense that they are getting a raw deal. I receive letters all the time in which the same phrases are used: “I have worked hard all my life. I have paid my taxes. I have cared for my family. I have taken hardly any holidays. And yet now I am to be hit by this pensions ruling. It just isn’t fair!”. There is widespread bitterness among many old people that the young have no idea and simply cannot imagine how anxious and distressed old people are at not being treated justly. There is alarm among them that many younger people think that the old have never had it so good and have lived lives of comfort and ease, while they struggle with changing financial pressures. But there are millions of older people who have led steady, responsible lives, caring for their families, honouring their communities, and they expect to be treated justly as society adjusts to the changing demographics.

As I said when I began, the old are increasing in number and they are alert, active, thoughtful and outspoken. They are looking to this Bill to help society to adjust to the changing demographics. They feel that they are in a van of social change and yet they are the victims of it. When making changes to the Bill, I ask the Minister to consider those injustices and discriminations against women and the poor.