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Julie Morgan: Is my hon. Friend aware that a memorial lecture was given for Professor Gillian Shephard in the south Glamorgan county council, where I was a member, and that her name lived on for many years in the title of that lecture?
Mrs. Curtis-Thomas: I presume that my hon. Friend is referring to Gillian Powell.
Mrs. Curtis-Thomas: Gillian Shephard is a remarkable woman, but I did not think she doubled as a professor of biochemistry in Cardiff, let alone that she was dead. I am delighted to hear about the lecture.
I am not at all surprised, given the generosity of my colleagues in Wales and their ability to recognise the values that women bring to the workplace.
WISE has been supported by another very important organisation, the Women in Engineering Society. What a fantastic group of women that is. It is 78 years old now—not the women, of course, though many members are of that sort of age. The organisation has been there for 78 years to support women and, crucially, to provide mentoring in the workplace.We have talked today about the fact that many women involved in science, engineering and technology careers find it difficult to stay in the workplace when they become parents. In conjunction with employers, WES has launched a scheme that brings those women—many of them with not one, two, but three degrees—back into the workplace after a period of leave that may sometimes be 10 or 15 years. Those women have extraordinary ability, and we lose a huge amount when they are lost indefinitely to the workplace. I commend WES and the excellent work that it has done.
The Government have done a great deal, as I know because I use the services that they provide. They support an organisation called SEAs—Science and Engineering Ambassadors, a group of 1,000 or more people around the country who are prepared to give up their time and go into schools to help with school projects. I hope hon. Members who do not know about SEAs will find out about them. Those people are waiting, enthusiastic and eager to help promote science, engineering and technology.
Another organisation, Set-up, was founded by two women in Cheshire, working hand in hand with SEAs. It was founded by Shirley King and Dr. Violet
Pritchard. Dr. Pritchard was one of the first women in Britain to study medicine. Fifty years ago, women who were good at science subjects did not have the option of studying medicine. They could study veterinary science as that did not involve bodies—it was not considered appropriate for women to mess with bodies. Vi was delighted that she was one of the first women in the country to undertake a medical degree. Shirley was one of the first women to head a technical college in Britain. Both of them founded Set-up well after their retirement in order to address an issue about which they felt passionately—the lack of women in science, engineering and technology.Careers in science, engineering and technology are remarkably creative, as I said, and extremely important in economic terms. Careers in science, engineering and technology pay more. For women who may find themselves on their own looking after a family, that is immensely important. We have failed to realise the potential of half the people living in this country. Until we do so, we will not reap the economic benefit to which we have a right.
Much has been said about the role of legislation. What the Labour Government have done has been enormously important. I have worked for many, many employers who resisted any change to employment practice in order to retain people like me. I have left employers because they would not adapt their leave policy to accommodate my caring requirements. I have left employers who would not allow me a flexible working day. In this place and outside, I have never worked less than 60 hours a week, but I would like to have worked those 60 hours when it suited my family requirements.
We have not lost anything by introducing legislation. We have freed up more people to go into the workplace. Not one of my employers was prepared to make that concession, not because they did not recognise the value of it, but because if they did and their competitors did not, they might lose competitive advantage. Although we may appeal to them and say, "Look, chaps, this makes huge sense. It's good for you and will help you with your recruitment and retention policy", ultimately they will refuse if it will cause a marketplace differential and add initially to their cost structure.
Legislation has been important in promoting women into work and retaining them in work. However, legislation alone will not tackle the problem of discrimination at its source. How do we encourage young girls from poorer backgrounds to aspire to go to university and undertake professional lives thereafter? We can do that only by providing good pre-school and primary education. If I had to name one step that the Government have taken since 1997 that has done more for women than anything else, it must be the Sure Start programme in deprived areas. It is a fantastic programme. If we do not get education right at pre-school level, what chance will those children ever have of going to university?
In this important debate on this special day, I stand here proud of the achievements that the Government have delivered in a relatively short period. I lived and worked in a world where that legislation did not exist, and it was extremely hard for women who wanted to
participate and work in the environment of science, engineering and technology to do so. I commend to hon. Members the work of all the partnering organisations that are helping us to deliver a better future for women in the United Kingdom.4.40 pm
Mrs. Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con): It is always a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas).
I intend to focus on older women—that is, those who have reached their 50s, pensionable age and beyond. There are still huge gaps in the system for that group, and the Government, among others, must be flexible in addressing their needs and concerns.
I want to flag up two lessons from the past. The first will be familiar to many Members who have dealt with relevant constituency casework: it involves the generation of women who, back in the 1970s, opted to pay the lower rate of national insurance. In the past couple of years, many of them have reached state retirement age, only to discover that they do not have the amount of pension that they anticipated because they elected to take that option. One of the most frustrating aspects of such cases is that when one tries on their behalf to find proof that they did so, it is difficult to find any tangible evidence. One is told by the responsible body—it used to be the Contributions Agency, then it was the Benefits Agency, and now it is the Department for Work and Pensions—that the information is on its records but there is no paper evidence. That shows us that whenever the state, whoever is in government, asks people to make such a choice, there should be a requirement to take a signature and to keep it on the record.
Angela Watkinson: I speak from personal experience, because I was one of those women. I remember having the situation explained to me in great detail, going to the social security office, or whatever it was called at the time, and signing.
Mrs. Browning: My hon. Friend must be the exception to the rule. In the constituency cases that I have taken up, people are very confused because they cannot quite recall what they did. They may have done the same as my hon. Friend or followed advice that they received in a workplace. When we are dealing with something as important as a person's future income in retirement, there must be a requirement to ensure that their decision is recorded so that if, for example, their Member of Parliament asks for evidence of it, they can at least fax us a signature. We simply have to take their word that that is what they elected to do 20 or 25 years ago.
We need to take much more seriously the whole issue of women's finance, especially pensions. Nowadays, much is done in schools to encourage young people better to understand their personal finances, budgeting, and the workings of the tax and benefits system. However, there is much more to do. It is horrifying that even people whom one would expect to have a good grasp of what they were doing sign up in later life to products such as equity release mortgages—a subject that I have raised in Adjournment debates—only to find that they have signed away their future financial security without realising it.
Cases of women who rely on their husbands' national insurance contributions for their state pension also need to be tackled. Although it is not a generational matter, it is becoming more so. I recently raised with the Minister a case of a constituent who received a pension based on her husband's contributions. However, when her husband retired, the then Benefits Agency wrote to him and not to her. It was not until he died that she had to start making inquiries about her entitlement. Even if her entitlement was due to his contribution, it is rather old-fashioned to regard her in the same way as in the days of goods and chattels. Nobody thought that it would be correct to write to her about her position. That is wrong because we all know of cases of bereavement in which women are suddenly faced with having to sort out their finances, in addition to grief and distress. That is even harder if they are genuinely not aware of their entitlements, based on their husbands' contributions.
We could easily make helpful adjustments for the future based on those two lessons from the past. However, women's working lives and patterns are different from those of men. The pay gap is closing, although we are not there yet, and there is more equality year after year. None the less, a gap continues to exist and it translates in old age and retirement into one in four pensioners, of whom women form the largest portion, living at the poverty level. We need to take some practical measures to deal with that.
I am appalled that a woman who has paid national insurance contributions for fewer than 10 years is not entitled to the state pension. If one took out a private pension and contributed for only seven or eight years, it would be illegal for the pension provider not to recognise that and pay out, albeit a smaller portion, when the person reached pensionable age. It is wrong that the state adopts a different set of rules. The problem has existed for many years, so it does not apply only to the current Government. A contribution that is small because of so few years' input is likely to be even more important to the person in retirement. It is therefore fair and just that there should be some sort of pay-out to someone who has paid in, regardless of the number of years.
We should also consider the lower earnings limit of £77 a week. We have all received representations on that because of the Pensions Bill. For those who earn low amounts of money for a large portion of their lives—for some people, that means all their working lives—it is even more critical that we use as much flexibility as possible and acknowledge that, when possible, they must be allowed to make some pension input. A woman's working life plan cannot always be defined.
Although I appreciate that my next point, about carers, does not apply exclusively to women and that men, too, play a caring role, older women often take on the caring role for an increasingly older generation of parents and relatives. There is a great difference between caring for older people and looking after children. I speak as someone who has worked since the age of 18 without a gap—when my children were pre-school, I worked only part-time—and I am now 57. There are times when one earns more and others when one can give more time, but although child care is hard and demanding, it is at least possible to plan in some ways. When children are 10, their needs are different from
when they are pre-school, and when they reach the shrugging-shoulders age of 16, they do not want anyone to look after them. At least a parent can plan.However, people who, in middle age, take on the care of older relatives do not know how long that will last. Those women do not know whether that will take them beyond the state retirement age, so the planning of that care and of their finances is so much more complex and difficult. I was listening to "Woman's Hour" as I was driving in this morning, and a range of women phoned in with contributions. The subject was the many women who, for all sorts of reasons—including many reasons mentioned in today's debate, and including the caring role that some women have taken on in later life—have found themselves having to enter paid employment beyond the state retirement age.
Like many people, I imagine that when I retire from this place—which I hope will not be for a few years yet—I will undertake some other form of paid employment. I hope that that will not be for the 60 or 80-hour week that we work here, but I should be quite happy to go and work for Tesco—or whoever will take the golden oldies then. I want to do that because I want to keep active, and we all have similar personal reasons or plans. However, I would find it quite stressful if I thought that I really had to work well into old age—perhaps into my 70s or even longer—for long hours, and not knowing for how long I would have to continue in work. Many people are now doing that. As was reflected in the "Woman's Hour" contributions today, there is a vast difference between people who take a job in retirement to keep their hand in, to keep their brain active and to give them social contact, and people who, because of lack of pension provision, have to work for more hours than are tolerable given their age and perhaps their state of health.
We need flexibility if we are going to take pre-emptive action to try to help that group of people. I realise that it includes men as well as women, but we are predominantly looking at a population of women with many of those problems in retirement, because women live that much longer. The Pensions Bill is currently going through the House, and I know that the Government have been lobbied on it by the Equal Opportunities Commission, Age Concern, the Fawcett Society and a range of other groups, which have practical recommendations on how to introduce more flexibility, particularly for lower earners and for women with huge gaps in their working lives. I hope that as the Bill goes through and more details are discussed, the Government will be receptive to arguments about those groups of people.
We know from the statistics that have been mentioned this afternoon that women live longer than men. I have to say that I have never been able to understand that. We women work so hard that I cannot imagine why we should live longer than men, but somehow, for some reason, we grit our teeth and do. I see that the hon. Gentlemen around the Chamber are grinning in agreement. In practice, that means that more women face old age for more years alone, and those women need to have more money because they have to provide for themselves for longer, often when they are frail and less able to do so much for themselves.
I hope that the Minister will take on board the fact that such women need particular attention. This is not simply a generational problem that will go away. We cannot just assume that because women have depended on their husbands' pensions in the past, that will happen again. We are now seeing a generation of women in middle and older age who are increasingly having to take on a caring role at the end of their lives. Very often, such women find that as soon as the kids are off their hands, the golden oldies start to need them, and sometimes there is not even a gap in between. It is quite worrying to think that the ability of those women to plan their finances, and to plan for their financial security, is much less favourable than that of many men.
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