My Lords, that was a real tour de force by my noble friend. She has laid out the problems of simplistic answers to the setting of the pension age. I would have preferred it if the strategy embodied in the Bill had been preceded by the kind of review referred to by my noble friend. The reality is as she spelt out. There has been due consideration and serious assessment of the statistics, certainly, but a simple and mechanistic relationship has been made between increased average longevity on the one hand and a Treasury-led assessment of what the nation can afford in the medium term on the other, on a fairly spurious basis.
I have two amendments in this group that move in much the same way as my noble friend’s amendments. She has made the case for looking much more widely when we come to review the pension age next time and ensuring that we do that by including it in the Bill. The central problem was also referred to by my noble friend Lady Turner in the previous amendment: the range of longevity and life experience is still enormously wide. One of the problems in this House, frankly, is that most of us have spent most of our lives in relatively comfortable positions and healthy and salubrious surroundings. In so far as we have been under pressure, it has probably stimulated our brains to function for slightly longer than many of our fellow citizens. None of that will go on forever for any of us but, nevertheless, we are in a fairly privileged group in that regard.
At the other end of the scale, there are people whose whole life has been in physical and intellectual distress and who have come in their 60s—let alone 67—and sometimes in their 50s to a position where they cannot sensibly work any longer. This is a minority group, but it is quite a large minority. It tends to be defined by occupational background, geographical area and income. All of those factors need to be taken into account in a much more sophisticated way in any future review. My noble friend referred to two wards in Norwich having that differential. We have long said in London that life expectancy declined if you went from South Kensington across to Mile End roughly by one year per stop on the District line. This is not an equal society, and we should not be imposing an equal retirement age on everybody, however they got there.
All these amendments ask is that we recognise that change is necessary. We recognise that there will be another review but at least let us ensure that our successors, in undertaking that review, looking at these wider elements. The extra bit in my Amendment 57 is that we should look specifically at the lowest end of the longevity increase or achievement, if that is the word, to see whether we need to make special provision for them in so far as we can define them. That is an exercise in the future, but this Bill could ensure that it is effective and undertakes a much wider review of life experience than a direct correlation between average longevity and the state pension age. I am very pleased to support my noble friend in her amendment.
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