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Women

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Gould for securing this debate today and congratulate her on it. She finished her inspiring speech by referring to Emmeline Pankhurst. Not long ago, many of us—including, we were delighted to see, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—were clustered rather damply under umbrellas in the teeming rain around Emmeline Pankhurst’s statue. Subsequently, in a Question on Women’s Day, I think the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, was delighted that Emmeline Pankhurst had finished her life as a Tory Party candidate. What she did not share with the House is exactly why Pankhurst made the move she did: she was ardently opposed to birth control, because she wanted purity for men rather than more promiscuity for women. Why that took her into the Tory Party, however, escapes me. To return more obviously to the topic of today, women have three-quarters of the earnings, half the income and about a quarter of the pensions of men. Women’s working lives and pension prospects are riddled with risk and uncertainty. I want to narrate one such life. A person partners, marries, has children, separates, divorces, is a lone parent, re-partners, and then in older age has a frail and increasingly elderly parent. That is not an untypical life nowadays. If the owner of that life was Joe, throughout all those moves he would have stayed in work full-time and built his pension prospects. Whatever was happening in his private life would have had little or no effect on his public life, except perhaps to make him miserable. Having children, he would none the less continue to save for his pension. On divorce, he would probably not have been caring for the children. Becoming a carer for an elderly parent, he would still have remained in full-time work, as the stats show. At any point at which you examine Joe’s life, as a series of snapshots at 27, 37 and 47, you could have predicted—subject to his not having a calamity—his pay and his pension. Instead, let us say that that life belonged to Joanne. Apart from marrying, every other of those interventions in her life would have affected her work and her pension. If she had children, she would have been only marginally connected to the labour market, a point I shall return to. If she divorced and then became a lone parent, she would take an earnings hit and a pension hit. If she went on to care for an elderly relative, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, mentioned, her earnings and pension would again be hit. Every one of those interventions would have affected her capacity to support herself, as well as to go into retirement with a decent income. In other words, where Joe’s life can be seen as a series of snapshots, and his prospects change barely at all over time—subject to him not being involved in a motorbike crash, or whatever—Joanne’s prospects are riddled with uncertainty. Unlike Joe, she could not have projected at 27, 37 or 47 what the next 10, 20 or 30 years would bring; whether she would marry, divorce, have children or be a carer; or what her state pension would be, and therefore whether it was worth saving for a second pension on top. The woman whose life is most riddled with risk and uncertainty is also probably the person with least knowledge and least leverage to do anything about it. As a result, for making decent choices all the way down the line to combine her work with her caring life—choices that she wants to make, and that society wants her to make—society then punishes her for insisting she takes an earnings hit by doing part-time work and a pension hit. She gets punished for doing what is right. The first step is her earnings hit. Many here today have mentioned the shocking fact, first produced by the EOC in its report, Part Time Is No Crime - So Why The Penalty?, and reproduced in the Prosser report, that women who go into part-time work take a 40 per cent earnings cut. What is more, 15 years later, if they go back into full-time work, they have still not recovered from that part-time earnings hit, sometimes because they have been clustered in the low-paid jobs in the five ““c””s: catering, cleaning, clerical, caring or cashiering. That part-time work is a positive choice, but it limits the jobs they can do. It almost certainly means that they perform under their skills level, and they usually work close to home to combine it with childcare. As a result 5 million women work part-time, 2 million of whom work below the lower earnings limit, which would build up their stamps for their pension. By making what they and we think is a decent and compassionate choice, juggling their work and life by going part-time, their earnings and pension are hit. While still caring for dependent children, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, said, the woman may also be caring for her parents as well. There are now more people living over 80 than under five. A quarter of all women today will live to 93. By 2030, the average life expectancy of a woman reaching 65 is likely to be 90. Four generations may therefore pivot around her health, her care and her work: her own children, her own generation, her parents entering retirement and elderly grandparents entering their 90s. In consequence, she will not only have taken an earnings hit through part-time work with a 40 per cent penalty all her working life, she will take a pensions hit as well, because pensions have been designed by men in full-time work for other men in full-time work. As my noble friends have said, in the Beveridge system, the man was expected to work at his job for 40 years or so, while the woman was expected to work at her marriage for the same amount of time and consequently could derive her income and then her pension through him. Now half of all marriages end in divorce, and by 2030 half of all older women between 45 and 65 will not be married. They may be single, cohabiting, divorced or widowed, but they will not be married and therefore not getting the spouse’s pension, and their caring responsibilities will have prevented them from earning a pension in their own right. That combination of fluid family forms, which have removed her right to a spouse’s pension—the ““halfway emancipation”” that my noble friend Lord Giddens talked about—the flexible labour markets, which have corralled her into low-paid part-time work, and increased longevity, which means she is taking on more and more caring responsibilities at the very point where government and society urge her to come back into the labour market full-time to build up a pension, mean that she cannot have it all, and she certainly cannot do it all. What she will almost certainly do is ensure that she builds up poverty for her old age in retirement because she does what we as a society want her to do, which is to put her family first. Joe, at 27, 37 and 47, knew what his pension prospects were likely to be. Joanne could not possibly have known what her life narrative was going to be, or what her attachment to the labour market, her caring responsibilities or her pension would be. I believe that we have come a long way, not just since 1918 but since 1997. I am proud of the legacy of our first Labour Government, who made work pay for women by introducing the minimum wage—two-thirds of whose beneficiaries were women—and by introducing tax credits, which ensured that a lone parent on the minimum wage of £5 an hour took home £10 an hour as income. An unskilled lone parent therefore got paid the same as a semi-skilled or skilled male. Our first Labour Government made work pay. Our second Labour Government made work for women increasingly possible not just through rights to ask for part-time work and maternity pay but through extended child care. What will be the legacy for women of our third Labour Government? I want it to be a universal basic state pension in women’s own right, which honours, respects and accounts for their unwaged work alongside their waged work. That means not cherry-picking from Turner and doing the bits that benefit men, but introducing the whole Turner package, which benefits women as well and, if necessary, bringing on the Turner proposals for a universal basic state pension faster even than Turner intended. We do not need more tweaks and shopping lists, or more means-testing; we should go for the Turner proposals, which cost the same as the tweaks by 2030, and which will ensure that women like Joanne can predict the pension that they will get in retirement and will have the confidence to build and save for a second pension in the mean time. As a result, we as a society will not ask the Joannes of this world to make choices where, if it is family first, that means herself last. I hope that my noble friend will say that she, too, supports the Turner proposals for women, so that the legacy of this third Labour Government will be to transform women’s prospects in old age.