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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, this afternoon, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in the House of Commons that there were secret bank loans to the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS amounting to £61.6 billion, an enormous amount of money. This money, hardly ever previously imagined, was given in October last year to keep those banks afloat. It was repaid in January of this year. As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said in his important speech today, the success of the Government has been to avoid the Conservative policy of choking off recovery. He pointed out that, quite rightly, the Government did not cut the deficit. For many years, pensions have been fixed with a general age of 60 and 65. Given that so many lives ended not far from 70, the relationship between life expectancy and retirement age was fairly close. However, with medical and behavioural activity, the ages of 60, 65 and even 70 have become very modest expectations. I remember when I was a boy visiting a woman who was 82, which seemed quite an exceptional age. Now, one’s expectancy of at least 80 or 90 years is not unusual. I have a couple of aunts in their mid-90s. There has been a big change. Given such expectancy, the age for accepting pension needs to take account of the improvements in health and their effect on one’s life. What I find so surprising is the small increase in life expectancy which obviously relates to one’s pension. However, much more is to come. The number of doctors dealing with age-related illnesses has increased greatly and many more medical treatments will be on their way even in the next 10 years or so. As a result of this, the limited change in the pension age has not dealt with this problem in the way in which it should have been dealt with. There needs to be a relationship between the increase in longevity and the pension. I find it absurd that the definition of the pension age is set for 68 in the 2040s. To think that there will be only a three-year increase in life expectancy over the next 30-odd years is absurd. Given the amount of medical progress that is being made through a considerable increase in specialist doctors, we cannot assess life expectancy so far in advance. We have a problem in dealing with this matter; it will be a difficulty. However, there should be also be a general acceptance that one’s age could lead to a new, more moderately demanding role, with less time spent working. Population increases outside Europe have accelerated greatly. The populations of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh add up to just over 1.5 billion—they used to be one country—and China now has 1.33 billion people. There has been an enormous increase in population. In the past 50 or 60 years, there has been a growth in both the population and the economy of so much of the world. The rate of increase there has been so much greater than in Europe. In this period, the world population has increased from 2.5 billion to 6.6 billion. As this continues, so Europe will not have the economic dominance it has had since the Middle Ages. Then, it became a prominent part of the world, with its productivity, expertise and trading, as well as its control over so much of the world’s development. We now see the growth of trading, which, apart from in Africa, has increased greatly. Europe has an important role, but during this century it will be met with the increasing powers of the rest of the world, which we shall need to consider.