It is a great pleasure to follow the Secretary of State. I shall attempt to do justice to his succinct speech. As he will know, yesterday was a very difficult day in Birmingham, and I know that the whole House will join me in sending thanks and good wishes to PC Adam Koch, who was so badly hurt on Saturday night. His extraordinary courage, together with that of local residents, helped keep worshippers safe at one of our local mosques. He is doing well in hospital. I know that the whole House will want to wish him a speedy recovery.
I am grateful for the note of consensus that the Secretary of State sought to strike in his remarks. As is appropriate for a Second Reading debate, this afternoon I would like to set out the principles on which we agree with the Government and then get stuck into a few of the details of some important matters that we think are still to be settled. We genuinely hope that the Government will listen during this debate and in Committee, not least because many of the issues I wish to raise touch greatly on the need for a comfortable and well-earned retirement for millions of people in this country.
I think that it is fitting to start my remarks with a quick word about history and the road to this afternoon’s debate. One of the chief reasons why the Labour party will not stand in the Bill’s way today is that we recognise the genuine effort to build on the strong foundations that we left. Indeed, our only disappointment today is that we think the Secretary of State is proposing to build only a halfway house on those strong foundations. We think that the Bill is merely half a reform. Therefore, the Opposition’s job during the course of the Bill’s passage will be to ask him not simply to fix some of the deficiencies we can see, but to be bolder and more radical and to seize the moment that we think is there for the taking. I want to set out a number of areas where I think he can do more to seize that moment.
I am glad that we bequeathed the coalition Government a strong foundation—an inheritance very different from what we found in 1997. The link to earnings had been snapped back in 1980, there were pension holidays for employers and the state pension had fallen from 20% of earnings down to just 14%. The pensions Minister himself said:
“Pensioners, rightly, do not trust the Conservatives on pensions.”—[Official Report, 6 November 2000; Vol. 356, c. 34.]
I am glad that he is working so closely in the coalition Government with the Secretary of State on their difficult task.
I have described the legacy that we tried to sort out. We genuinely wanted to leave the Government a different state of affairs. There is no better summary of our work
than the research published by Her Majesty’s Government confirming that pensioner poverty had fallen to the lowest level for 30 years.