My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Hollis for opening what appears, from the expressions of those in the Minister’s Box, to be an unexpected line of engagement in the complex issues with which we are dealing.
The issue of buying back national insurance contributions has been engaged with most recently, as the Minister will realise, in 2006, when the six-year buyback was relaxed in certain circumstances of some complexity. I am conscious that we are moving inexorably towards the clauses in the Bill which in the House of Commons were described as being the complex clauses, which deal with transition. Clauses 2 and 3 deal with entitlement to single-tier pension where the national insurance contributions are all close to 2016, because of the provision in Clause 4(1)(c), but this seems as good a place as any to deal with this issue, which may well have been properly engaged with under a later clause because it lies within the years that my noble friend is interested in—more in the transitional phase than the projected phase of post 2016.
It is none the less a valuable issue. It allows me to take advantage of a completely coincidental e-mail which I received at exactly 4 pm today. With the permission of the Committee, I will read this set of personal circumstances to the Committee. I think that it illustrates the real challenge that the limitations generate for real people. I cannot imagine that this woman who has written to me and, probably, to other Members of the Committee, is unique. I will protect her identity by anonymising her, but will read just a couple of paragraphs to the Committee, if I may.
6.30 pm
They state:
“I am writing to ask your help for those women who, like me, will lose our right to a basic and widow’s pension with the new bill. I have been married for over 30 years. For many years I worked, but my work was part-time, poorly paid, and only available during teaching terms, so I never built up my own record of NI contributions. I was still in education when the married-woman’s stamp ended. We thought about making up the shortfall in my NI contributions but money was tight and we always knew I would be able to claim on my husband’s contributions, particularly if I was widowed. We never imagined this would change. When I was unemployed I did not claim benefits (and therefore credits) because my husband was working.
I did have three years full-time work, which necessitated me working 200 miles from my home. My husband then became chronically ill with heart failure, and I gave up own work to help him remain working for as long as possible. It was hard for me to lose the chance of a career of my own but it was a sacrifice I had to make to help my husband facing this devastating illness. We felt we could manage without claiming carer’s benefits (which again would have protected my NI record), but when he did eventually have to give up work as his condition worsened we made sure that he claimed incapacity benefit, purely so that his NI contributions—and therefore, we thought, my pension—would be protected.
Again, we thought of buying me extra years, but were assured when we looked for advice from the Department of Work and pensions that I would be better off claiming on my husband’s record. My husband will reach pension age under the present system, with a full 35 years contributions, which we were always promised would cover me. At 59 I find that the pension promises which we trusted our entire lives are going to be torn up. If we had known this would happen of course I would have bought more contributions, signed on when unemployed, applied for carer’s allowance—but I can’t go back and change the past. The retrospective nature of these changes is terribly unjust and causes us both huge anxiety and fear for the future, particularly for when, as is likely, I am widowed, and lose three-quarters of our income”.
I am not arguing from these Benches for this particular relaxation of the rules at this stage. Engaging with these circumstances and this consequence of the operation of the rules relating to national insurance contributions in the circumstances that my noble friend so clearly laid out, gives us in this House a responsibility for people just such as my correspondent. I hope that the Minister will give me the opportunity at the very least to write back to her and refer her to the official record of today’s Committee to say, “There is an answer to your problem and that is what it is”.