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Living Standards

I spent this morning talking about living standards with mothers in my constituency, who are losing a day's pay today to stand with other public sector workers fighting for a decent pension. They told me that they had not taken strike action lightly or easily, and had never been on strike before. Many of them are low paid; they are all women. They told me that under the Government's proposals for public sector pensions, when they retired they would receive only just enough to keep them above the threshold for means-tested benefits. The Government like to encourage the myth that pensions in the public sector are gold-plated; they are anything but. The average pension in local government is £3,800 a year, and for women it is even lower—£2,800 a year. More than half of all women pensioners who have worked in the national health service receive a pension of less than £3,500 a year. Nobody in society benefits when pensioners are in poverty, and if people are reliant on state benefits in retirement, that costs the taxpayer more in the long run. Although in my lifetime we have seen progress in terms of a fairer deal for women, it is undeniable that the women now reaching pension age are still at a disadvantage because of the decades for which women's pay was lower. The Government talk the talk about a fairer deal for women, but I do not believe that they walk the walk. Many of us who campaigned alongside thousands of women born in 1954 will remember that the coalition had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make concessions to those women. Under this Government the pay gap between rich and poor has been widening, and last week the Office for National Statistics figures showed that for the worst-paid jobs, the jobs traditionally held by women—the hairdressers, the dinner ladies and the waiters—pay has fallen sharply in real terms.