State Pension Age (Women)

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Teresa Pearce]

I agree: this is not just an economic issue or a gender issue, but a class issue.

As I was saying, many women have done part-time work or have taken time out of the work force altogether to raise children. Many women worked in part-time jobs at a time when part-time workers were unable to take out a private pension. Those women have worked for 40 years, paying their national insurance contributions. They were looking forward to the retirement that they expected to start at 60. They, and I, were disappointed when it was announced that the age of retirement would go up from 60 to 65 between April 2010 and April 2020, but we accepted that and planned accordingly. Now, these women find that just as they are nearing the end of their time in the labour market, the goalposts have been moved yet again.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Some of the women in my constituency who have approached me about the issue have found out about the changes by reading about them in the newspaper. There has not been adequate information. Does the hon. Lady share that concern?

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Webb]

We had to take a judgment about not affecting people who were within a few years of retirement, those who were 58, 59 or so and were set to get their pensions in their early 60s. We took the view that change for them would be too soon, which is why nothing at all changes before 2016. However, having gone past that initial point, the crucial group—the one-month cohort, which a number of Members have mentioned—will, assuming that the Bill gets Royal Assent this summer, get six years and eight months’ notice of the change. I accept that notice, which has been mentioned by several Members, is the key issue.

[Dr Whiteford]

The issue is not only the pace of change. It is the context of a lifetime of low pay and inequality faced by many women, and the old-age problems that are a cumulative effect of that. The Government had an opportunity here to tackle women’s inequality in old age, but so far they have, instead, arbitrarily targeted women born in 1954.

[Steve Webb]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising the position of women in the pension system. Assuming that some of the pension reform proposals in the Green Paper that we published last month go ahead, for example the single flat-rate decent state pension, the group of women most affected by this change would be the first group of women to benefit, and potentially very substantially. At the moment, women draw a state pension of £40 a week, on average, less than men, but under the single-tier pension proposal, which I have been very involved in introducing, many women would be the main beneficiaries.

Various Members have raised the important issue of women whose pension rights have been hampered by time spent bringing up children or caring for relatives, and under the single-tier pension proposal a year spent at home with children or a relative will be worth just as much to a state pension as a year spent running a FTSE 100 company. So much do I take the view—in government as I did in opposition—that the work that men and women do, whether paid work or bringing up a family, is of equal value, that for the first time we are proposing that that be manifest in the pension system, and that will be transformative, particularly for women.