I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree that there is a specific set of circumstances around these pension schemes. I am certainly not saying that accruals and the terms and conditions of a pension can never be changed in any circumstances, but there is a specific set of politically charged circumstances to do with the privatisation of these industries. Specific undertakings were given to the members of those schemes to encourage them to accept, if not actively support, the privatisation of the industries in which they worked. I urge the Minister to tell us this evening, if he can do so, whether he intends to use the power he is giving himself in the Bill to honour the promises made to the members of those schemes. If he will not do so, we will force a Division to test the opinion of this House on amendment 37, which would mean that the promises made to the 50,000 or so men and women in those protected schemes were met.
I am conscious of the time and allowing the Minister appropriate time to respond to the broader debate. I noted closely what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said about her new clause 6 and her belief that the 700,000 or so women in the group born between 1951 and 1953 will not get the new state pension, because they are the last pension cohort
before the equalisation of the pension age, whereas men of precisely the same age will get it. Let me put it in simple terms: if there were twins, one male and one female, in that age cohort, the male twin would get the new state pension in 2016 but the female twin would not, having retired a little earlier. Such issues do emerge when we are involved in pension reform. The Minister and I have gone back and forth on the matter on a number of occasions, and I will not anticipate his arguments because we have gone through them some time before. However, we have to look at the issue in the context of a view that has grown up among many women that this Government’s attitude to their pension provision is not as generous as they believe it should be.
When considering the 2011 legislation, we had to deal with the issue of a significant number of women having very little time to prepare for retirement and short notice. They would have had to work for longer but some of them would have had only five years to prepare for that. They were five years from when they thought they would be retiring and then found out that they might have to work for seven more years. I am pleased that the Minister made a concession on that, although he did not go as far as we wanted. That group of women—a slightly different group from those we are dealing with here—who were also approaching retirement, felt that they were being unfairly treated. Not only did they feel, rightly, that they were being unfairly treated, but we have also had to deal with the Minister’s approach to auto-enrolment, which is excluding more than half a million women—and rising—from the benefits of auto-enrolment, because of the raising of the threshold for auto-enrolment in line with the personal allowance. A general sense has developed that this Government do not quite get it with women and pensions.