Charlotte Nichols – 2022 Speech on the State Pension Triple Lock
The speech made by Charlotte Nichols, the Labour MP for Warrington North, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.
We all know that this is an alarming time for our constituents, as we face a winter of soaring energy, food and necessities costs, but it is even more so for pensioners on a fixed income. In the past few weeks, we have heard Tory Ministers giving their out-of-touch solutions for the cost of living crisis: “Get a new job,” or, “Work more hours”. That is patronising and unhelpful advice for desperate people of working age, but it is even less helpful for the elderly.
The number of pensioners in poverty has risen by almost half a million in the last decade, and now the Conservatives will not even commit to maintaining the pensions triple lock. They have already broken and back-tracked on so many of their 2019 promises that they have no mandate for what they are doing, but I warn them that if they abandon this commitment as well, the pressure for a general election will be unstoppable. With rising prices, hits to private pensions and the crisis in the NHS and social care, pensioners face a triple whammy if the triple lock is lost.
In recent weeks, I have been alarmed listening to the experiences of my elderly constituents, who, during my regular doorstep surgeries around Warrington North, have reported to me that not only are they not turning the heating on, as they are frightened of the cost, but that their estates have been going dark early in the evenings, as even keeping the lights on is becoming too expensive for too many. That is not just in the central six wards of Warrington, which have historically faced higher levels of deprivation, but even in our ostensibly more affluent areas, such as Rixton-with-Glazebrook, Culcheth, Woolston and Croft, where incomes and rates of home ownership are higher, and which we would not typically associate with fuel or food poverty. That pain and anxiety is being felt right across the board by our elderly residents in Warrington.
I want to draw the House’s attention in particular to the mineworkers’ pension scheme and the report published last year by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, on which I serve. We noted that the 1994 scheme’s sharing agreement allows the Government to keep 50% of any surplus from miners’ pensions. Since then, the Government have received over £4.4 billion from the scheme without contributing a penny, while former miners receive an average pension of only £84 a week, leaving them dependent on the maintenance of the state pension. This is intolerable. We made a clear cross-party recommendation that the scheme should be reviewed and the £1.2 billion reserve fund be given back to pensioners immediately. No progress has been made in the past year. I urge the Minister to get this done. Retirees in coalfield areas such as mine deserve better, and righting this wrong will be a huge boost at a most needed time.
As one of the younger Members of this House, I can report that many of my generation despair of ever receiving a state pension worth the name. They may think that this is a debate that does not affect them and is just another example of the Government taking from the young and poor to give to the elderly and wealthy, but they are wrong. If we do not fight for pensions to be protected and maintained now, we really will not have a worthwhile income in retirement tomorrow. The real-terms impact of a cut now affects future retirees even further—in cumulative lost interest in every future year—than the impact on pensioners today. I want to see social security for old age for people like me, born in the 1990s, and younger, not see it wither away now. This is even more vital as house prices have prevented many young people from stepping on to the housing ladder, so we will be carrying debts and mortgages to an older age. The way we challenge generational unfairness is by doing more to tax accumulated wealth, particularly wealth that is hoarded rather than invested.
The whole country knows that this Conservative Government have crashed the economy. They know that the Government are desperately looking for soft targets to make cuts, but there are not any more after a decade of failed austerity. The Government cannot be allowed to use this as an excuse to desert their triple lock promises as well. Old and young, we will be watching closely to see how Conservative MPs vote today on this basic issue of generational fairness and giving people the reassurance they need at this difficult time.
