Let me begin by declaring an interest. For 20 years I was a member of the mineworkers pension scheme, for 16 years I was a member of the local government pension scheme, and for the past seven years I have been a member of the parliamentary pension scheme.
This is a debate about trust, or rather about the breakdown of trust. The people who are covered by the Bill are those we trust with our most precious possessions: our children, our partners, our parents, our families and our communities. As we all know, when things are going wrong it is the public servants we turn to, and in whom we place the maximum trust.
We turn to the firefighters when our safety is compromised, our homes are at risk and our lives are in danger. We turn to the police when we are in trouble,
when we face the despair caused by burglary, car crime or petty theft, when our kids go missing, and when we are being persecuted by nuisance neighbours or antisocial behaviour. We turn to the nurse when we are at our lowest ebb, when we are desperate for help, and when we need real human kindness. We turn to the doctor when we are at a loss to explain our pain, when we need their skills to put us back together again, and when we feel that there is nowhere else to turn.
We turn to the social worker when we are in despair because of our parents’ dementia, when our youngsters are hooked on drugs, and when we need real help to sort out life’s real problems. We turn to the home care worker when we cannot cope any longer with our daily lives, when we need a stranger to come into our homes and become a friend, and when only an extra pair of hands will do. We turn to the teacher to take our children on to the next stage of life’s journey, to shape our kids for the world to come, and to inspire our most precious gifts.
There are so many more: the bin man, the caretaker, the school meals lady, the gravedigger, the gardener, the midwife—and, among the hundreds of others, the so-called back office staff. They are the people who make the front line work effectively, and the people whom the Government disparage most of all. All those people are trusted by us to do the right thing when we need them to. We expect—no, we demand—that they do their jobs properly, and we trust them to do so. But trust is not a one-way street: if we expect those people to do the right thing, we should do the same.
For decades, many of those workers have been putting their trust in us as representatives of the state, and have paid into pension funds every week or every month in the belief that they will be rewarded properly for their work. Let no one in the Chamber claim that public servants somehow get a free ride when it comes to pensions. As was pointed out earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), they have given up a percentage of their pay in order to have a decent retirement and not to have to rely solely on welfare payments in old age.
There is no free lunch for those workers, no matter how much the divisive policy of the Conservative party or the TaxPayers Alliance may try to claim it is so. The Bill clearly undermines the trust that these workers have been able to place in their pensions for decades. Just five years after the agreement to changes that were supposed to be affordable and sustainable, they are seeing the imposition of changes that will significantly weaken their potential to plan properly for their retirement.
We should hear no more about unaffordability until we in the House face up to our culpability in terms of where we find ourselves today. It was Members of Parliament who allowed public sector scheme employers to take lengthy contribution holidays while the lads and lasses at the front end had no such luxury. The classic example, which I raised earlier—and it is not the only one—is Royal Mail. Between 1998 and 2001, it made no contributions whatsoever to the pension fund. Now we are told that the service must be privatised because there is a huge black hole in the pension fund.