This amendment is the last in the series and is, I hope, equally short.
Some dozen years ago, with the help of my noble friends Lady Dean and Lady Turner, we established pension-sharing on divorce. For many couples then, the man’s pension, especially his occupational pension—and it was usually his—was more valuable than the home, but it was not regarded as a matrimonial asset. Even now, not enough solicitors, in my view, seem to be fully aware of that, although couples will often trade: she the house, he the pension.
For less well-off couples, his additional state pension was a structured income that could be shared to help her too. Therefore, at the point of divorce—usually, perhaps, in the couple’s early 40s—she could substitute his NI record, so far accrued, which might be 20 or
25 years, for her own, and in addition they could have attributed to her half his additional pension. As I understand it, in the future she will be eligible to pension-share his SERPS or S2P—that is, his additional pension acquired up to that point—but not to substitute his basic NI contributions for her pension if hers are also more favourable. She is on her own.
Again, it is a matter of age. Younger divorced women, with or without children, will have enough time, through either NI contributions or child credits and, I hope, universal credit, to build their own pension. However, older divorced women in their 50s do not have that head space or do not always have that resilience; they may have been looking after his elderly parents for him or have helped him, as we learnt at the time, unpaid, to build his small, self-employed plumbing or taxi-driving business, keeping the books and booking the jobs. When looking at this in 1995, my friends and I found countless stories of this exploitation where she sinks her labour into his work, he builds up his pension—assuring her that it is for both of them—and then, at quite a late age, she gets dumped, as the phrase goes, for a younger model. I would be sorry to see history repeat itself. We can avoid that by permitting a transitional period of 15 years. I beg to move.