| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Stephen: Is it correct that the unfunded liability of Germany will be equal to its gross national product by 2030? By contrast, have not we in Britain built up a vast fund--my right hon. Friend tells us that it is £600 billion--which not only will provide security for people in their old age but provides an enormous fund for investment in British productive industry?
Mr. Lilley: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is the case. It is something in which we take great pride and on which we have been determined to build by introducing measures to encourage further growth of occupational and personal pension schemes. If they did not exist, and if none of the private provision that I mentioned earlier did not exist, we would have to pay out some further £25 billion a year to take over on behalf of the state what is currently provided by the private sector. That would increase the state's budget by about a third.
So it is absurd to take the "ideological" position--I use the word of the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury--of hostility to the development of private provision not only for administration but for general provision of insurance and saving products to allow people to boost their position in times of need.
The Labour party has finally destroyed any claim it ever had to be able to reform the welfare state. It has set itself rigidly against any serious change or reform. It opposes every savings measure. It is opposed even to making savings on running costs. It is opposed to sensible private sector involvement even where it will give value for money. It repudiates any expansion of private sector provision of benefits. The reason why it does so is clear--a mixture of ideological hostility to the private sector and subservience to the public sector unions which insist on monopoly state provision, and which, of course, sponsor so many Front-Bench Opposition Members.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North):
When the Secretary of State talks about reform of the welfare state, he means substantial undermining of the welfare state. That is how he conceives reform. However, he was right in one thing. He said that the matter would be decided at the general election. Indeed it will--the sooner the better.
It is always useful when we have such debates to recognise that there is a fundamental difference between the Government and the Opposition on state provision in welfare and related matters. The Secretary of State nods in approval. At one time, the situation was different. In the early post-war years, when the Labour Government built up the welfare state--one of the greatest blessings that this country has known--the Conservative party took a different view. It took the view that, if it was to win back and hold on to office, it had to accept what had been legislated for between 1945 and 1951. For some years in government, the Tories more or less accepted the welfare provisions. That changed about 30 years ago.
The Tory party has been under mounting pressure from right-wing think tanks to do away with a great deal of what was achieved by the Labour Government in the early post-war years. For example, in 1990, before the Secretary of State occupied his present position, what I describe as the wrongly named Adam Smith Institute argued in a pamphlet that unemployment benefit should be privatised. That led to quite a row in the House at Social Security Question Time on 2 July that year.
A pamphlet, with which the Secretary of State perhaps privately agrees, argued that unemployment benefit should be a matter for the private sector, not the state sector, and that sudden increases in unemployment, which would be a burden on the private sector, could be dealt with by not paying unemployment benefit in the first few weeks. That was suggested as one way of saving money.
The pamphlet also said that people should be able to tide themselves over short periods. When people with family responsibilities and the rest of it, including my constituents, lose their jobs, few of them are in a position to tide themselves over until they can find another job without unemployment benefit and, where appropriate, income support. Bearing in mind the low pay that so many people receive in this country, that is hardly surprising. The people who write such pamphlets live in a different world. They do not live in the real world that we know about and a large majority of our constituents have to endure.
It is interesting that the pamphlet six years ago said that unemployment benefit should be paid for less than 12 months. I am sure that those who were responsible for the pamphlet will be pleased that the Tory Government have implemented that aspect of it by introducing the jobseeker's allowance, an entirely unjustified measure to reduce unemployment benefit from 12 to six months. When the constituents of Conservative Members become unemployed, I wonder how many of them will applaud what the Government have done with the jobseeker's allowance.
Mr. Sykes:
Why can the hon. Gentleman not persuade Opposition Front Benchers to promise to reverse the measure?
Mr. Winnick:
The question comes from two quarters. Tory Members want us to make commitments so that they
The state pension is vital for millions of people: it is not some sort of extra, but the core amount for millions of people who retire. If there is any dispute about that, I refer the House to a parliamentary reply about the state pension that was recently given by the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, the hon. Member for North Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), on 11 July. Anyone who suggests that the pension does not amount to a large proportion of a retired person's income should consider that written answer. It said that 72 per cent. of pensioner households relied on the state pension for 50 per cent. of their income--quite a large amount--and 51 per cent. of pensioner households in the country relied on a state pension for 75 per cent. of their income.
Mr. Nigel Evans:
Why should we take lessons from a Member of Parliament whose party twice stopped the Christmas bonus for old-age pensioners?
Mr. Winnick:
It is rather an impertinence--
Mr. Winnick:
If there are any apologies to be made, they should come from the Conservative Government who, in 1980--I was in the House when it happened--decided that they would no longer increase the pension in line with earnings, and pensioners lost out. Before I am asked again the inane question why the Labour party does not make a commitment, I can say that I have already given my response.
The Labour Front-Bench team recognises that, when there is a Labour Government, Labour Members will use every opportunity to try to see to it that pensioners' income is substantially increased whenever possible. I do not notice any pressure being exerted by Tory Members on Ministers to increase the state pension other than in line with inflation. That is an important difference which the country recognises: the commitment of Labour Members to improve the living standards of those who have retired.
I do not accept that the private sector can provide adequate pensions for the large number of pensioners. In his concluding remarks, the Secretary of State paid lip service to the private sector and all that it can do. It cannot provide anywhere near adequate pensions for the large number of people on low pay--I am talking not about 100,000 or 500,000 people but about millions of people.
I do not believe that the private sector is interested in such people. The private sector cannot provide pensions for those people who are often in and out of work through no fault of their own or for the long-term unemployed. Ministers and Tory Members refuse to recognise that, time and again, it is the state that provides the core support that people would not otherwise have. That is why the Labour party is committed to building up the welfare state, and that is why reforms have been carried out by successive Labour Governments.
Many people were actively encouraged to opt out of the state earnings-related pension scheme and to take up personal pension schemes--we know what has happened to a large number of those schemes. Many Conservative Members would not, on reflection, try to defend or justify such schemes--I leave aside pension swindles and the other matters that we know about.
I want the state pension to be improved. I hope that it will be possible for the Labour Government to do so in the way previously undertaken. I understand the difficulties and I shall not say from the Back Benches what I would not be able to say from the Front Bench. To make commitments at this stage would only play into the hands of the present Government.
We owe a responsibility to the retired population and to all those people who have had difficulties in the past, certainly before the second world war, in finding work. We have a commitment as well to those who worked in the post-war years, believing that, when they retired, they would have an adequate pension on which to live.
I sometimes get the impression that Conservatives believe that it is undignified to rely on the state, and that one should always have one's own private means. I shall relate a personal experience, when I felt no loss of dignity when I had to rely on the state. As some of my hon. Friends know, I was recently in hospital and, having paid my insurance contributions all my employed life, I felt no indignity when I relied on the hospital and the medical staff--I relied on them for my life. I was very pleased at what the medical staff were able to do when it came to my NHS operation, which I hope will have lasting effects. I felt no indignity because I did not reach for my chequebook; I had paid already and will continue to pay through my national insurance contributions, as I am fortunate enough to earn my living--many people in this country are denied that opportunity.
That episode illustrates the welfare state. Unlike other countries such as the United States where there are private insurance schemes--many of which are inadequate--in this country, when I required state help, it was there. Conservative Members will probably say that the NHS continues. I know that the Secretary of State does not have direct responsibility for the NHS, but he is a member of the Cabinet.
One of the lessons that I learned--if I needed to--from first-hand experience during my first two days in hospital earlier this year involved the tremendous financial pressures under which the hospital operated. There had to be negotiations between hospitals when patients needing needed to be operated on, which was not dignified--I shall use the word, as I have used it earlier--for the surgeons and others involved. We should have no complacency about what has happened to the NHS in the past 17 years.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |