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Mr. Swayne: The last time we were faced with such a situation, the then Secretary of State at least showed up--although the Treasury Bench was entirely abandoned by the right hon. Lady's colleagues.
Mr. Hawkins: My hon. Friend is quite right.
Earlier this evening, by accident, I saw a Labour party political broadcast. It was not a broadcast of hon. Members in this debate talking about abolishing the widows pension and forcing widows on to means-tested benefits; it was full of the usual smug, sanctimonious claptrap. There was nothing about European policy, about which the Labour party is clearly ashamed; it was supposedly a party election broadcast for the European elections, but it talked entirely about domestic policies. It did not admit the truth because today's Labour party knows that if it tells the truth about its policies, nobody will want to support it.
We want to expose the truth about new Labour policies, as the three Labour Back Benchers have already done. The hard-faced, uncaring new Labour party is not fit to call itself a caring party. A constituent wrote me a letter which I received this very day. He said:
This is a betrayal of all that the old Labour party claimed to stand for. If Ministers had any guts, they would demand that the Secretary of State come and face the music and they would listen to my hon. Friends the Members for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) and for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh), and to the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel), who made valid points attacking the proposals.
The proposals are an outrage and a betrayal of what new Labour said at the general election. They should be dropped and the new clause should be substituted for them.
Mrs. Maria Fyfe (Glasgow, Maryhill):
I subscribe to what my hon. Friends have already said. I want to concentrate on the position of the 45-year-old widow with no dependants. Until now, such a woman would have had up to 15 years' widows pension, up to the age of 60. From that, we are going to the extreme of having only 26 weeks' widows pension.
I urge the Government to rethink their policy, because they are treating all women over 45 without dependants as though they were in identical circumstances. A small minority of women are well-off in their own right. A woman might have a good salary or a substantial pension from her husband's employment. Better-off families will have taken out insurance so that, when either spouse dies, the mortgage will be paid, but plenty of families cannot afford such insurance.
At the other end of the income scale, women on income support have the widows allowance deducted pound for pound in any case. The circumstances of a vast swathe of lower-paid women in the middle are not being sufficiently regarded. The vast majority of working women are in jobs that pay less than the male average wage. Some have been on very low pay and are only now beginning to benefit from the national minimum wage. Some will not have been working at all while raising their families. A woman's family might have left the nest only recently, leaving her on her own.
Why are women in that position being given only six months to find work, training or other means of support? Mention has already been made of how traumatic it is to be suddenly widowed. The widow has to get over that pain and distress and launch herself into a career that she might not otherwise have had, with all the difficulties that one can imagine for someone whose skills have gone rusty over the years. Why make no distinction between the different circumstances of women? Why treat all women as if their circumstances are all alike? It does not make sense.
I was amused to notice that the Bill provides that the benefit would not be payable on remarriage. That was a sensible provision in the context of a span of up to 15 years, but suggesting that widows will remarry after six months reminds me of Hamlet describing Gertrude as remarrying in time to serve the funeral meats at the wedding feast. I wonder how many widows marry again within six months of bereavement. I suggest very few. The vast majority will have to launch themselves into the world of work.
I beg Ministers to reconsider this issue. The Government have done good work helping other groups having difficulty getting back into work, in particular through the new deal for under-25s. Why is insufficient notice taken of the needs of that middle-age group of women? We need a new deal for widows, not the treatment that the Bill will give them. I urge the Government to rethink that aspect of the Bill.
Mr. Brazier:
At this stage in the evening, the blood sugar is getting low and the House is often fairly empty, but the quality of the speeches that we have heard in the past hour or so is enough to energise anyone. I think in particular of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), and I also regret missing part of the speech
The three worst features of the changes that the Government are making in social legislation are combined in the provision that new clause 1 seeks to address. First, the provision would undermine the contributory principle and force people into means testing. Secondly, it would hit an especially vulnerable group in an especially obnoxious way, while saving relatively little money. Thirdly, it would put one of the final nails into the coffin of one of the few measures left in the tax and benefit system in which marriage still plays a part.
In an excellent opening speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) admitted to some wearing of sackcloth and ashes for the record of the previous Government on means testing and the contributory principle. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead chided us mildly--and all the more effectively--for the number of times that we departed from the contributory principle.
I would rightly be chided by you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I were to repeat the points that I made on Second Reading, but I wish to tell the House that the great conversion came for me when I saw the massive impact on pensioners' saving behaviour of the changes the previous Government made in 1988. Some 500,000 pensioner households ditched their savings when they discovered that they could live better off the state than by retaining their savings and providing for themselves. We slapped in the face those who had sought to use their modest savings to top up their retirement income and rewarded those who did no such thing.
A smaller group would be affected by this provision, but it is an especially vulnerable group. I do not wish to cover the same ground that so many hon. Members on both sides of the House have covered so effectively, but I wish to throw in three brief thoughts of my own.
The first concerns the position of someone who has just lost their husband, someone who--as several Labour Members have said--may have been earning for long periods, but has not had a proper career in any sense that we would recognise. All the work may have been part-time. It may have been full-time work, but at a miserably low wage. It is one thing to expect that person to re-enter the labour force, but quite another to expect her to do so and find work within six months. Realistically, the earning power of someone who has not had a proper career--a person of that age who may have been out of the world of work for a bit--is very small. It is hardly fair to choose to take money from that group of people.
Secondly, if we are to say to people who have lost husbands, and who are grieving, "We shall not look after you all the way through", surely it must be possible, simply out of common humanity, to give them longer than six months. If the Government want to put aside the contributory principle, there is surely a case in elementary decency for more than six months. The sums involved are relatively small. When the existing generation has worked its way through, only a few hundred million pounds a year will be saved. If we were to extend the period from six to 18 months, the cost would be in tens of millions, not even hundreds of millions.
I shall conclude with a political point, which I should like to share once more with the House, which is remarkably well attended for almost 1 o'clock in the morning. Repeatedly, at every stage of the Bill's passage, whenever Conservative Members have said, "The Government pledged themselves to make people more self-reliant but now they are introducing more means-testing," we have had the same jibes--from Ministers. I am not talking about distinguished Back Benchers who have maintained the same view throughout. Ministers have jibed, "Look at all the means testing that the Conservatives introduced."
"An unbelievably unfair change is proposed . . . How can it be right?"
He had never received any verbal or written information about what the Government intended. He said:
"This reduction would cause considerable hardship to my wife should I pre-decease her . . . I feel very strongly that this proposed legislation should be withdrawn."
The letter ends with a request to forward it to the Secretary of State, but I am unable to draw the matter to his attention tonight because he does not dare to come and listen to Labour Back Benchers--former Ministers--attacking the Government's policies.
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