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Mr. Hawkins: I think that my hon. Friend is being remarkably polite to the Government. Would he agree that people are starting to discover what is happening? I do not know about other hon. Friends, but I have started to receive letters from constituents, from husbands who are starting to discover Labour's betrayal. Our constituents who may be affected by the Government's proposals are becoming extremely angry.
Mr. Pickles: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a betrayal of everything that the Labour party used to stand for. My great grandfather helped found the Independent Labour party. He would be ashamed of the decision taken tonight. [Interruption.] It is worth while attending these debates because one learns something.
Mr. Field: I shall speak to amendment No. 20 and the linked amendments, but before I do so, I hope the House will allow me to comment on the speech that we have just heard from the official Opposition. As usual, the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) was gentle in his intervention.
Unlike the hon. Member for Northavon, I have been in the House for 20 years. During that time, there must have been 20 occasions when the then Conservative Government attacked the national insurance principle, the national insurance system and the contributors who, over a long period, had built up what they thought were entitlements.
Although it is always welcome when a sinner repents, and we know that there is much rejoicing in heaven when such an event occurs, when there is a mass conversion, as seems to be happening on the Opposition Benches, I am not sure what is going on up there. Their conversion is welcomed, but some of us feel that it is 20 years too late.
Tonight we have been looking at the broad canvas of the Government's welfare reform programme. We spoke earlier about the single gateway and one of the most successful parts of that programme, the new deal. Labour Members rise with considerable pride to support their Government in the changes that they are bringing about through that programme. The Government are turning a largely passive welfare service into one that is proactive and that tries to help many of our constituents who were largely ignored by the Conservatives.
There is a clear difference between the way in which this Government behave when reforming welfare, and the behaviour of previous Conservative Administrations. The Government have raised substantial sums from the privatised utilities to ensure that there is not just rhetoric, and that staff are not simply given more power to persuade some claimants that they should be more anxious to seek work. The Government have laid down a programme to ensure that there are real opportunities for them.
It is noticeable that Labour Members speak about the new deal with pride and confidence. However, when we move to another aspect of the Government's reform programme--their reforms of or, some would say, cuts in national insurance--uncertainty is expressed on these Benches. Partly to counter those uncertainties, my hon. Friends and I tabled our amendments.
When the Conservatives were in government and were hacking away at the insurance system, on at least 12 major occasions we in opposition spoke with one voice. We said that those attacks on the insurance system were an unwarranted attack on working-class values. In our communities there was a decency that sprang from wanting to look after oneself and one's family, and a real wish to pay those contributions.
We attacked the Conservative Government for endlessly pushing our constituents on to means-tested benefits. We saw during those 20 years a welfare state
that was largely based on a system of people paying for it through their direct contributions being changed to one that was paid for largely by taxation and in which an ever-growing body of our constituents were dependent on means-tested assistance.
At the end of the Conservatives' stewardship, one in three of our constituents were living in households dependent on one or more of the major means-tested benefits. We did not attack the Conservatives for ideological reasons; we did it because they had attacked the basis of the way in which our constituents tried to survive and live their lives. The Government were developing a powerful engine and teaching people not to work and not to save or, if they did either of those things, not to tell the truth.
The reforms in the Bill affecting widows will affect older women and older men so I hope that all of us have received some correspondence--though perhaps not quite as large a correspondence as that which has already been received by one Member of the House--from people who contributed to the insurance system knowing that their wives, and then their widows, would be covered should their health fail.
Those people are coming to the end of their working lives and may have contributed for 30 or 35 years. They would not have had the resources, even if they had had the freedom of not contributing to the insurance system, to make alternative provision for their spouses. That group in particular will be hardest hit by this reform. I hope that we will hear from those on the Treasury Bench an assurance on how that fits in with the programme of reform that the Cabinet approved in the first Green Paper on welfare reform and with the Prime Minister's more recent remarks about the kind of welfare state that he wants to be more firmly established in this country.
In the Green Paper, the message was clear: we would move from the provision that we have now to provision that would increasingly place the emphasis on contract. We would do so because we thought that that would add not merely security in respect of how people runtheir own lives, but protection against attack from Governments, and because those benefits would be safer if there was transparency and people could see clearly what they were paying and what they were receiving.
The Prime Minister has said more recently that it is his wish to move from a something-for-nothing society to a something-for-something society. All of us knew what he meant by that. Many of us would have felt that it was noble that some people should get something for nothing in our society, and that being dependent was a noble situation for many people to be in. Most of us read his speech as the country read it, quite properly--he would have a determined war and drive against those scallywags who think that they can take most taxpayers to the cleaners not once, but on many occasions.
Given that it is the Prime Minister's wish for welfare to be based on something for something, it is difficult to justify the Government's changes in the provision for widows. We are taking away benefits--contributions towards which may have been made for more than30 years--and substituting nothing, which is the exact opposite of what he says he is about.
There would have been an alternative way to reform widows benefit--maybe one day this approach will be adopted--had we introduced universal and compulsory
stakeholder pensions reform that brought in age groups regularly as they came on to the labour market. We could have ensured that each of those groups had life cover on the back of their pensions cover. That would have been very cheap, because there would have been no cherry- picking from the private sector. Everyone would have been covered and we could have moved safely to seal the national insurance widows benefits for those who would have alternative provision. Sadly, that alternative is not on offer at the moment.
I should like briefly to say what the amendments attempt to achieve. They attempt to ensure that women aged 35 and over will continue to be covered by the range of provision that they currently have--not only for the national insurance benefit, but for the state earnings- related entitlements which widows have. We are not trying to reverse the first or the second major attack made on SERPS by the Conservatives when they were in government; we are accepting SERPS as it stands as the status quo.
Amendment No. 20 and subsequent amendments would ensure that women aged 35 or more continued to be entitled to their current entitlement. Younger women would be expected to have alternative insurance cover, as they would be in a position--if not financially, at least in terms of their age--to make that cover. In that sense, people would not be pushed on to means-tested assistance. There would be time to make those changes, and those who had paid for their entitlement would be secure.
There are a number of amendments in this group, and I am sure that many hon. Members want to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Later, we shall need to consider which amendments should be pushed to a vote. As you know only too well, once we have finished with the Bill, it will go to another place. I am fairly confident--at least, I hope--that the amendments that my right hon. and hon. Friends and I have tabled will be moved in another place and will thus become part of the Bill for us then to reconsider in this House.
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