My Lords, I will be pretty brief.
Until the Bill comes into force, a married woman would qualify for 60% on her husband’s record on retirement. A widow would get his full record, which was usually the full 100%. That is a different issue because they claim entitlement to different sums. In future, under the new state pension, she is on her own. If she does not herself have the requisite number of NI years, she gets no derived pension either as wife or as widow; she will be reliant on means-tested pension credit. To change the system in that cliff-edge way is quite wrong.
We know that mortality and morbidity rise sharply with age. There is a threefold increase in deaths between 55 and 65. In that decade, twice as many men die as women. Usually, they will have died from lingering illnesses, such as cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s or similar, unlike younger men who tend to die from external accidents and so forth. Their wives may for many years have been home, been around, reassuring them, helping and caring but not perhaps sufficiently to get a carer’s allowance, and carer’s credit has only recently been introduced and is not sufficiently known about or claimed. Then, after 2016, he dies. Her own pension record is considerably incomplete and she cannot substitute his contributions for her own.
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Mr G, who wrote to me and perhaps to others and who has given me permission to quote him, said that his wife worked part-time for many years below the LEL. They have no children and she has no pension of her own. He thought that she would get not just the married women’s dependency pension while he lived, but also the full inherited widow’s pension when he died. He said:
“All my contributions were made with the promise—a promise in existence for our entire lives—that they ensured my wife would inherit the pension on my death. These promises we are told now are null and void. It is easy for parliament to rewrite longstanding legislation, but we cannot go back in time and rewrite our lives. It would be different if we had been given 20 years to prepare for this change, but we never dreamed that these promises would be broken”.
He adds that he had hoped she would get his full state pension and a few thousand of his private pension. Now she will get only the small private pension and a means-tested top-up if she qualifies for pension credit. She loses several thousand pounds a year. He continues:
“Poorly paid in her working life she now faces her entire state pension removed in widowhood. I cannot describe how anxious and betrayed we feel”.
As he said, we can change the legislation, as the Government propose, but he and she cannot go back in time and change their lives. We are talking about an average of 7,000 widows and widowers a year, which is a tiny number. I hope that we can help them. I beg to move.