Pensions Bill

My Lords, first I thank very sincerely everyone who has taken part today. As my noble friend accepted, there has been widespread support from everyone who has spoken, men and women alike. Several former Secretaries of State, including the first Minister for Women, three former Chief Secretaries, a former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and the chairman of the major and historic Pensions Commission all support the amendment. I ask my noble friend where the support was for his position today. There was none. He made the point, which I absolutely accept, that the amendment may be technically defective. Every ex-Minister in this House—there are many of us here today—knows that very often the House may decide to support an amendment that is technically defective, and if that expresses the opinion of the House the Government then take on the responsibility to come back at Third Reading with an amendment accordingly. That is not an issue; obviously we just do not have the drafting skills that the DWP would have. This is a very simple amendment. At the moment, if you miss a year when you are 45 because you are looking after a sick relative, you can buy it at age 50; but you cannot buy it at age 59. It is often only at age 59 that you know that you need to do it, but by then it is too late. The amendment would permit women and men to buy up to nine missing years at the proper price at the end of their working lives when they know whether they need to do it. No one is getting anything extra; we are not extending eligibility in this at all, because everyone who could buy at the end of their working lives could have bought earlier. That is why the cost assumptions are actually fairly flaky. Everyone who would be eligible to buy at 59 could have bought perhaps at 55 or 50 had they known, had they been able to afford it or had they been able to assess whether they needed to. In the amendment, we are simply extending the possible take-up of a right that already exists for all of us. My noble friend has run only one real argument, which is cost. But, hold on, 250,000 people already take up voluntary purchase. We accept the cost of that, even though it is students or people working abroad who may well be building additional pensions. Yet for poorer women, who I am concerned about, this may be the only pension they can ever afford—there are perhaps 40,000 of them—and we are told that we cannot afford to allow them to take up their rights in year seven, although they could had bought them in year six. That is absolutely absurd. As for workers overseas and the cost of possibly £230 million, apart from the de minimis rule, every one of them can buy now. I repeat: provided the cost is adjusted, I cannot for the life of me see why it matters whether you buy the added years when you are 45, 50, 55 or 59. That is the only point of the argument. It really will not do that those who know about voluntary purchase and can afford it at the time—I suggest that they are the better educated and the better off—do so, but those who do not know about it, who are less well educated, less savvy about the system and less able to afford it do not. Who are they? Very often they are women who have exhausted themselves by physically and financially caring for others. I repeat: nobody would buy anything that they were not already entitled to under existing rules. They would merely buy the entitlement when they knew they needed it. That is all that this amendment would do. If the argument of cost is, ““We cannot afford them to take up the provision””, then, my goodness, that applies to every benefit we have. Nobody in this House would raise an argument, for example, that as only 85 per cent of people take up council tax benefit, we should not encourage the other 15 per cent because we cannot afford the take-up. Nobody would say that, because 90 per cent of people claim DLA, we will not encourage the other 10 per cent to take it up as we cannot afford the take-up. Yet that seems to be my noble friend’s argument—we cannot allow people to take up a right that they already have by getting rid of the six-year bar. We would not run that argument anywhere else, except today apparently. I suggest that the arguments are spurious. If we want people, especially women, to have pensions—as we do—we cannot also argue that we will not allow them to buy added years to build that pension. We want to help women to help themselves. They have to live on something. If we do not allow them to buy their own pension, they will live on a means-tested benefit that they have not paid for. Which makes better sense? I hope that your Lordships will today support the amendment. The other place has not even considered the issue. If we support it today, we will have done something rather special because we would have ensured that virtually all women in this country can retire, if they choose, with a full basic state pension. For the first time since Beveridge, we would have completed the contributory principle. That would be a wonderful thing to do today. I propose to test the opinion of the House. On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 2) shall be agreed to? Their Lordships divided: Contents, 179; Not-Contents, 86. Clause 3 [Contributions credits for relevant parents and carers]: