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Mr. Rendel: I am delighted to follow the two previous speakers, whose speeches I mostly agreed with. That will come as no great surprise to the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles), with whom I found myself in considerable agreement on several of the amendments that he tabled in Committee on this part of the Bill.
I was interested in the points made by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who seemed to come close to saying that if the Government accept the amendments, they will have fulfilled the requirement which the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar outlined--that the imposition of the changes that the Government are trying to introduce, particularly the cut in widows pensions, would be put off for a time. I hope that the Government will listen carefully because the amendments would allow them to overcome the fact that this measure would be a very sudden imposition.
Amendment No. 2 would have a different effect. It goes part of the way towards the move that was being made by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead in that it phases in the changes over a five-year period, rather than bringing them in straight away.
The overall effect of the proposed changes in bereavement allowances will be a cut of some£600 million in the long term. The cut in widows pensions is larger than that. However, some of the changes that the Government propose are welcome, such as the extension of bereavement benefits to widowers. That was rightly forced on the Government through the European courts, but the Government have taken on board the need to make that change. We all respect the need for equality between the sexes in these matters, so it is right that benefits previously available only to widows are now being made available to widowers. That is a small extra cost compared with the proposed cuts in benefits.
The Liberal Democrats also welcome the doubling of the bereavement payment from £1,000 to £2,000. It has not been raised for a long time. There is no question but that the extra costs involved in bereavement, such as funeral expenses, have gone up over time, and it is reasonable that the payment should be doubled. Again, the cost of that is small compared with the overall savings that the Government are making.
Had the Government come to the House with a Bill that included a certain number of potential savings that they could justify on the basis that they were increasing some benefits--whether bereavement benefits or payments to widowers--and that the cuts were necessary to pay for the extra benefits, many of us would have been able to accept that. However, the difficulty that we have with the Bill as it stands is that the major, significant cuts to these benefits are not necessary to cover the extra costs. The Government are making some £750 million worth of cuts at a cost of only £150 million, which is a net cut of£600 million in the long term. We see no reason or justification for that.
The hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar was kind enough to refer to some of the arguments that I used on a previous occasion. I contend that the six-month limit on the bereavement allowance is far too short to allow people who have been recently widowed to recover from their bereavement. Sadly, many of us have lost a close friend or relative, and we know that that can set us back for some time. Happily, most of us have not yet lost our spouses; some may never do so. I am happy to say that I have been married for 24 years, and I can only imagine what it must be like to face the loss of one's spouse after that length of time. It must be a shattering blow.
We are talking about people who lose their spouses when they are still comparatively young. Sadly, the loss of the spouse will be a traumatic and unexpected event, perhaps as the result of an accident or even suicide. It is the traumatic and sudden loss that is most likely to cause the surviving spouse real trauma, which may take months to get over--certainly a great deal longer than the six months in the Government's proposal. That is far too short a time to enable the widows or widowers who are left behind to recover their lives and to have a chance of getting back into work.
There is, however, a problem relating to the way in which, up to now, benefits payable to widows--which will, in future, be payable to widowers--were expected to make up not only for the amount that the woman involved might have earned later in life, but for the loss of the earnings of her partner who has died.
In future, a number of people will undoubtedly find themselves bereaved, having expected to live another 10 or 15 years with the spousal income still coming into the family home. The loss of that income will be a significant factor for the surviving family. One of the reasons why people were happy to pay national insurance contributions in the past is that they genuinely believed that the payment was intended to take account of just that sort of loss of salary in the later part of their married lives. The fact that that is now being lost is, I think, a reason for those people to believe that a genuine contract between the state and the individual is, sadly, being broken as a result of the Bill.
In some cases it will be too late to do anything about this, although such cases would certainly be met by the amendments tabled by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead. Some people--such as a gentleman who has written to me--will find that, although the wife may have never expected much more in the way of salary to come in from her husband, it is now too late to make alternative arrangements. A man who wrote to me recently said:
The Government have said all along, and no doubt will say again today, that their proposed changes are intended to help the most needy. They want, perhaps, to take a little money from those who do not really need it to provide a bit more for the least well-off. One of the Government's arguments in Committee was that a great many people who currently receive widows pensions do not need the money all that much, because they are receiving some other form of income.
We have already heard the argument that such benefits rely on the contributions of ex-spouses. There is a strong case for saying that those who make insurance payments when young have a right to expect insurance pay-outs when they are older, and that it is necessary for those who are putting something in to be promised something at the end--that we should have not a nothing-for-something but a something-for-something society. If the Government really wanted to target the neediest members of society in making the big cuts that they are making, they would feel confident about giving a little more to the very neediest. That is why our new clause 4 directly addresses that point.
There will, of course, be some widows who are comparatively well off. Some widows will perhaps find it comparatively easy to get over the death of their spouse. Some will find it easy to go back into work and to earn an income in later life, but there will always be others for whom that will not be easy. There will always be others who do not come into the richer category, whom the Government seem happy to deprive of their benefits. There will always be others who depend on means-tested income support. It seems unfair that their widows pension should be removed, with no alternative means for them to obtain income.
If the Government's wish to give back to the poorest some of the money that they are taking away from the comparatively well-off is genuine, surely they should see the point of new clause 4--all we ask is that at least those who are bereaved and who then depend on income support should have their incomes raised to the bereavement allowance amount, which they will receive only for six months, and for which their husbands have paid through a lifetime of earnings and contributions. It is for that reason--to follow the Government's own theme of trying to give back a bit more to the most needy--that we hope that the House will accept new clause 4.
Mrs. Dunwoody:
All Parliaments and all Governments have been known from time to time, when they found themselves in control, suddenly to decide that the things that they were attacking when in opposition were not quite as dreadful as they initially imagined. It is not exactly a new phenomenon, but it is one that some of us find difficult to accept.
I hope that the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) will not misunderstand me if I say that I was irresistibly reminded of the walrus and the carpenter when he told us how he wept for us and deeply sympathised. Those of us who know what happened to those for whom the walrus had that warm streak of sympathy will remember what the Conservatives did when they had control of the national insurance system.
All Governments take political decisions. They decide what their priorities are, what is important to them and to those who support them. Therefore, it should be accepted that the amount that will be saved by the change may not
be quite the world-shattering amount that it appears tobe on first acquaintance. Indeed, what we should be considering are the implications of the decisions of those who, having for many years accepted the idea of a national contributory scheme, at this juncture, with very little preparation and very little open discussion, are now prepared to abandon one particular aspect of it, which will affect a group of women who are least able to cope.
"as a State Pensioner I am not now in a position to make alternative widows pension arrangements. I am 65 years of age, had major heart surgery and my wife of 24 years is only 51 years of age, as a profession she provided a home"--
spent her life providing a home--
"for my two daughters"
and for him; and now she takes care of him. She has not had
"the training to earn a salary on my demise."
Such a woman would not expect much further salary to be brought in by her husband but, because of the almost immediate effect of the Government's proposed cuts, there is now no way in which her husband--already of pensionable age--can make any sort of alternative arrangements to ensure that his wife would not be not driven into deep poverty were he to die in the near future.
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