Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Steve Webb
My hon. Friend is right that we do not want to see a levelling down in pension provision. We want quality pensions for our public servants, but we want to make sure that many more people in the private sector get quality pension provision as well, and auto-enrolment will help to achieve that.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
11. If he will amend his proposed welfare reforms to minimise the risk of children entering poverty.
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)
The overhaul of the benefits system through the Welfare Reform Bill will hugely improve the incentives to work. Universal credit will bring in an improvement for children, in that 350,000 children will be lifted out of relative poverty. As the hon. Lady may be aware, we have also made available an extra £300 million for the poorest people who are caring for children.
Debbie Abrahams
The Children’s Society’s analysis of the impact of the welfare reforms says that they will push more children into severe poverty and homelessness. Currently, one in four children in my constituency is in severe poverty. Eighteen bishops have called for the Secretary of State to reconsider his position on the reforms—will he listen to them?
Pensions Bill [Lords]
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(14 years, 3 months ago)
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Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
I rise to speak on behalf of the hundreds and possibly thousands of women who have contacted me on this matter. I also speak as a woman who is directly and personally affected by the Government’s changes, so I am in a position to tell the Government what is happening to women of a certain age when it comes to pensions.
The women who have contacted me have told me that they expected changes in the pension age. They know that we are all living longer—or rather, that some of us are—that we need to plan for our retirement better and over a longer period, that we need to pay more for our pensions and that there needs to be some equalisation between when men and women access their pensions. They understand and recognise all that. However, it is the speed at which the changes are being implemented that is causing anxiety and fear among women who no longer have time to plan and save for their future.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I, too, have been contacted by hundreds of concerned women in my constituency. Although we acknowledge the Government’s concessions, which they probably made because of the pressure that those women have put on them, they will not meet everybody’s needs. Hundreds of my constituents will still be up to £11,000 worse off, with not enough time to plan for a reasonable pension in their old age.
Pat Glass
I absolutely agree. This is just one more Government policy, on top of others that directly affect women and young people more than any other group, that will impoverish women. Whatever last-minute fixes the Government come up with, it remains wrong to penalise disproportionately women who happen to be between the ages of 56 and 58, many of whom have worked all their working lives. Many of them will have held several jobs in order to keep their families. They have paid their taxes and their bills, and, quite frankly, they deserve better than this.
Pensions Bill [Lords]
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(14 years, 7 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Like other Members, I am encouraged by the agreement across the Chamber, particularly on issues related to fairness that mostly affect women. We agree, for instance, that we are all living longer and therefore need to extend our working lives. Contrary to what the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) said, the last Labour Government took that into account in the Pensions Act 2007, following the recommendations of the Turner commission.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Malcolm Wicks) made a relevant point about variations in life expectancy connected with socio-economic inequalities, and about the time for which people in a healthy condition can expect to live. I agree that more research should be done on that.
Harriett Baldwin
The hon. Lady mentioned the steps that the last Government took to deal with increasing longevity. Does she agree that the figures produced by the original Turner commission suggest that things are moving much faster than was anticipated even in 2004, and that since then longevity has increased by at least a year?
Debbie Abrahams
I think that the hon. Lady is referring to the average. It is important for us to consider not just the average, but how the figure is spread across different socio-economic groups. It does not explain or excuse the Government’s failure to protect the women who are being detrimentally affected by the acceleration of the equalisation of the pension age.
As many people have pointed out, this is about fairness. We must focus on what is right, and the Bill fails the fairness test. Many figures have been cited in relation to what the Bill means nationally. Half a million women will have to wait more than a year longer to receive their state pensions, 300,000 will have to wait an additional 18 months, and an unfortunate 33,000 will have to wait a further two years. Moreover, the Government will increase the state pension age for both men and women to 66 in 2018.
I asked the House of Commons Library to conduct an analysis of the impact in my constituency. I discovered that 4,300 women and 3,800 men would be affected, and that approximately 200 women would experience a notional loss of income from their state pensions of up to £10,700. I have been contacted by dozens of women in my constituency who have been working since the age of 14 or 15, including one called Linda Murray. She gave me permission to use her name. She was born in 1954, and left school at 16 to start work. She wrote:
“I have never had a job that provided a pension or had the means to provide one for myself. I have worked full-time apart from a few years when I worked part-time while helping to look after my mother who needed 24-hour care. For most of my working life I expected to receive my pension at the age of 60. However when the age started to rise I accepted this, as did everyone else. My retirement date was set at 64. I now work 47 hours a week in a dry cleaners and it is hard manual work. Due to my personal circumstances, full retirement is not an option for me, at least for a few years, but I was planning to greatly reduce my hours. I know that I won’t be able to continue working as I am now until I’m 66.”
Many Members have mentioned that that is hard to do because of the physical wearing out of the body.
Linda continues:
“But my take-home pay is £267 a week—how am I going to be able to save enough from this to be able to work part-time when I’m 64?...This proposal is ill thought-out and cruel. It’s unfair to move the goalposts for a second time. Women of my age have worked hard and honestly and don’t deserve to be discriminated against in this way. We accept the need to equalise the retirement ages but it should be done in a fair way. I feel that this Act will create an underclass of women unable to continue in their present employment, unable to find another job and denied the pension to which they are entitled. In an interview in The Daily Telegraph…David Cameron said that a sudden rise in women’s retirement age was out of the question.”
So that is another broken promise. There are hundreds of women with similar stories, and there is considerable cross-party agreement that we need to do something about this. I therefore hope that Ministers are listening.
Another fairness issue is the switch from the retail prices index to the consumer prices index. The Department for Work and Pensions impact assessment produced figures that again suggest that the burden will shift from the Government and employers to the individual. Some £500 million will be taken from the Pension Protection Fund.
My final point is about the increase in income thresholds for automatic enrolment into occupational pensions and the delay in that regard. The former Labour Government introduced that measure in the Pensions Act 2008, but the current Government are restricting access to it by both increasing the threshold from £5,000 to almost £7,500 and introducing a three-month waiting period. Again, women and people in low-income jobs will be particularly affected. Indeed, the impact assessment suggests that those who will be most detrimentally affected will be women, people on low incomes, ethnic minority groups and people with disabilities.
We must not allow our pension system to be reformed in a way that pushes pensioners deeper into poverty. Labour did a lot to reduce inequalities—although I would have liked us to have done a lot more—but these reforms will make them worse.
Nick Boles
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and he is absolutely right: the contrast is stark and is not flattering to the Opposition. Indeed, I would go so far as to claim that the curious thing about the Labour Government is that they demonstrated the quality we would normally associate with Oppositions: total opportunism—the total failure to grapple with any difficult long-term issues, and instead doing just the easy things that win votes at the next election.
Nick Boles
I thank the hon. Lady—and remind her that her Government had been in power for 10 and a half years by the time they introduced those Acts, even though it was clear long before they took office that such problems existed. However, I do not want to be too ungracious and I do accept that some things were done—but not enough and too late.
So why are the Opposition taking this approach of opposing everything under the general charge that it just is not fair? Is it really fair to tell people that a budget deficit on the scale that we face can be dealt with without pain; without some people being asked to sacrifice things that are important to them; and without everyone in the country experiencing a real material loss? Is it fair to tell young people that, actually, there is no reason to pull back on EMA; that there is no reason to restrict their income when they stay on in education; that there is no reason to change the basis of funding for universities?
Welfare Reform Bill
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(14 years, 10 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I shall be brief, as I know that other Members still wish to speak. We have heard useful contributions from Members on both sides of the House. There is cross-party consensus that the welfare system needs to be reformed, and there is even common ground on the reasons for the reforms, such as making work pay, and on what we need to do about the problem, such as simplifying the benefits system.
I want to put on the record the fact that there have been some unhelpful and unhealthy remarks, particularly statements that equate the reforms on making work pay with, if not a kick up the backside for people who are deemed to be workshy, then its equivalent. I found that particularly objectionable. I began to make a list of the Members concerned, but I ran out of space.
I want to dispel some of the myths perpetrated about worklessness, which includes unemployment and incapacity, whether the result of illness or of disability, and to explain why the Bill not only fails to address key issues such as the taper of the universal credit but, in conjunction with the disasters of the Government’s economic and employment policies, risks increasing both child and pensioner poverty and inequalities, as well as creating a new underclass. We also know that there will be consequences for the health outcomes of the population as a whole.
On unemployment, constituents are coming to my surgeries having either had their jobs threatened or just lost their jobs, and it is insulting that we should consider some of them to be making lifestyle choices. Unemployment is not a lifestyle choice. There is clear evidence that unemployment has profound negative effects on the physical and mental health of not only the people who are directly affected, but their families. Studies suggest that there will be an increase in all-cause mortality as a result of unemployment, so we need to be very mindful of that.
Indeed, if we compare the level of incapacity benefits with health data, we find that it is a good indicator of population health. It is reliable, legitimate and not an indicator of malingering. There is overwhelming evidence that the driver that brings down worklessness is a high level of sustained economic growth, but the current fitful recovery will not help to get people back into work. Given the Government’s cuts, nothing will help those people.
In addition to the Bill’s appalling timing, it lacks an understanding of the importance of appropriate welfare to work programmes and fails to distinguish between job-ready and long-term claimants. That will again hinder people from getting back into work.
My final general point is about the Bill’s direction of travel. When we compare different international systems, we find that those with highly decommodifying state support packages—where state support ensures that a basic standard of living is maintained—have fewer income inequalities, a host of social benefits and no negative impact on health outcomes, as measured in particular by infant mortality.
Welfare systems also have an intergenerational effect. In the US we have seen that evidence, and I see patterns associated with what we have been introducing, and that effect also occurring here. Children inherit their parents’ poverty, and we cannot allow that, so I recommend that we look again at the detail of the Bill.
On the Bill’s specific measures, I have already mentioned concerns about the taper, and I hope that the Government will commit to an annual review of the rate and introduce it at 55% rather than at 65%. In addition, the payment of the universal credit needs to be more flexible, as many of my hon. Friends have said, so that we do not exacerbate child poverty any further.
I would also welcome some clarity about the earnings disregard—the amount a household can earn before they lose their entitlement—to ensure that work pays for all. Members have already mentioned the reduction in the child care costs that the working tax credit covers, and I hope that we can look again at that. Save the Children estimates that some families could lose more than £1,500.
Free school meals are another important source of support to low-income families, and I am concerned that the Bill does not describe how they will be maintained under the universal credit.
The withdrawal of employment support allowance after a year is absolutely disgraceful, and again we should learn from other countries. We have seen what has happened in the States, and the effect on families has been absolutely appalling.
Finally, the conditions, sanctions and penalties associated with the universal credit must be reasonable, take account of specific barriers to work and ensure that work does pay.
So, I will not be supporting the Bill—