I remind the hon. Gentleman of the coalition Government’s provisions. We had a proposal that worked for pensioners—we had a long-term plan—but the coalition Government speeded it up without any regard for the people affected by it, so I will not take any lessons from Conservative Members.
As I was saying, the £28 billion a year less that will be spent on state pension provision is a huge cut that has not been given proper acknowledgement by the Government. I hope we will debate it further in the House. Will the Minister confirm that the Government’s so-called long-term economic plan involves cutting £28 billion from pensions? What assurances can he give to today’s younger generations—who face higher housing costs, the largest fall in real wages and greater insecurity in the workplace—that they will have sufficient income in retirement?
Labour will continue to ask the Government to be far more transparent about the long-term winners and losers from the new state pension. Withholding that information may be politically advantageous in the short term, but in the long term it serves only to undermine public trust in saving for retirement, which Members on both sides of the House agree is the right course for all our population and is in the national interest.
Members on both sides of the House showed enormous interest in a related debate in Westminster Hall last week, which was triggered by more than 140,000 signatures on the petition by WASPI. There was standing room only, not, I suspect, because it was my first outing on the Front Bench, but because of the significance and importance of the issue to many Members and 2.5 million of our female constituents. Indeed, the Minister might wish to note that they include more than 4,000 women in his own constituency. I therefore hope that he will expand on the Government’s consideration of transitional protections for those women, too many of whom were not given proper notification of the acceleration in their state pension age.
The Government have failed to respond to a number of proposals, including specific solutions for the 1951 to ’53 cohort of women, who will not have access to the new state pension that we are agreeing today; for those born between 6 October 1953 and 5 April 1955, who face a delay of more than a year; and for the women born later in 1953, who have had a double whammy of changes in 1995 and 2011. What assessment have the Government carried out of those options?
Alternatively, it was suggested during the passage of the Pensions Act 2011 that maintaining the qualifying age for pension credit according to the 1995 timetable would protect some of the most vulnerable people. Have the Government reconsidered the issue since then?
Turning to another element of the regulations, I note the proposal to freeze the saving credit element of pension credit, as announced in the autumn statement. For the 438,000 pension credit recipients who receive only the saving credit element of the pension credit, their losses will not be offset by the rise in guaranteed credit. Their pension credit reward will, therefore, be reduced.
Unfortunately, the Government have so far refused to come clean about the impact on some of Britain’s poorest pensioners. According to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, 1.2 million recipients of pension credit will lose an average of £112 a year from the next financial year. That figure will be significantly higher for many people, including those in the poorest fifth of pensioner households. Will the Minister confirm that some of Britain’s poorest pensioners will be worse off as a result of the measure, and will he commit to publishing a more detailed impact assessment than that produced to date? Will he tell us exactly how many people will be worse off and by how much?
Knowledge is power, and people need to be empowered by knowledge when it comes to their retirement. I hope the Minister can provide some answers today, because that is the least that this and future generations of pensioners deserve.
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