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Mr. Gerald Howarth: I am delighted to hear that the Minister has found another purpose for the AFPRB, which serves further to undermine his earlier argument against my proposals. I certainly welcome the fact that he has suggested that the early departure payments scheme should be extended to the AFPRB for its consideration. I am sure that the House will welcome that.
I appreciate the support of all the Members who have said kind words about the new clauses. In particular, I recognise the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) made and that the Minister rightly picked up. The litmus test is what the scheme will do for retention. We cannot be sure what it will do, because the jury is still out. The backing of the Scottish nationalists has extended the range of support for the new clauses, so the Government should listen carefully because support for them is coming from across the House.
I take the point that the Minister makes about not including the provision in the Bill, but I am sorry that he feels unable to do that. I also think that he is being unfair on the issue of the full career pension. There is simply a difference of view between us. He rightly said in Standing Committee that there was a cost implication, and I fully accept that there may well be. Cost implications surround the issue and one of the tricks is to find a way of giving the best possible service to our armed forces that is consistent with exercising a proper constraint on public expenditure. The Minister and his Department know the arguments just as much as I and my party know them. However, we all feel that our deliberations should be determined by what is best for our armed forces. Clearly, nobody has a blank cheque—I have no more of a blank cheque than the Minister has—but the issue that we must bear in mind is what is in the best interests of our armed forces.
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My hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh described the pensions that we receive as Members of this House as contributory, the implication being—I know that he did not mean it—that the armed forces do not contribute to theirs. There is widespread resentment throughout the armed forces at the idea that their pension is a perk—a free gift from the Ministry of Defence and the Government. It is not. As the hon. Member for Dunfermline, West (Rachel Squire) knows better than anybody else, members of the armed forces pay for it. When considering salaries, the Armed Forces Pay Review Body discounts the amount that, in its view, service personnel are getting as value for their pension. The value of that abatement is currently 7 per cent.—it was 11 per cent.—so the idea that the armed forces do not contribute must be scotched once and for all. They receive a lesser salary than they would get if the appropriate contribution to meet the worth of their pension were deducted from their salary.
Mr. Francois: The point that I was trying to make is that although the media often acknowledge that members of the armed forces contribute to their pensions, they do not always acknowledge that Members of Parliament contribute to theirs. I was simply trying to make that point in the interests of balance. Service personnel rightly chip into their own pensions, and we thank them for it.
Mr. Howarth: My hon. Friend has put that point firmly on the record.
Unfortunately, time is running out and we have other important business to attend to. I hope that the Minister has noted our concerns, particularly in respect of full service career pensions; I suspect that these matters will be taken up in another place. We will simply have to wait to see how the early departure scheme works out, but in the interests of moving on, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.
New Clause 7
'From 6th April 2005 existing widows and widowers currently in receipt of an unattributable Forces Family Pension shall retain that pension for life.'.—[Mr. Gerald Howarth.]
Brought up, and read the First time.
Mr. Gerald Howarth: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 8—Date of marriage—
'From 6th April 2005 widows and surviving registered unmarried partners of all service personnel shall receive a full widow's Forces Family Pension based on their spouse's or partner's length of service and final salary regardless of that date of marriage or registration.'.
Mr. Howarth:
I regard these matters as extremely important, and in the absence of a satisfactory answer
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from the Minister, I might well have to invite my hon. Friends and others to press the new clause to a vote. I do not suggest that as a threat; rather, the business arrangements of the House are such that it will probably assist you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I explain my position at the outset.
New clause 7 deals with widows who have unattributable pensions—in other words, widows whose husbands died from natural causes rather than as a result of service. Under the current scheme, certain widows—here, I include widowers—retain their pensions for life should they care to remarry or cohabit, and others do not. A distinction is made according to whether the spouse's death was attributable to service or not. The new scheme will remove that distinction, and will allow all widows and unmarried partners, of whatever sexual orientation, to keep their pensions for life.
Nevertheless, the changes laid before Parliament in this Bill will create a group of disadvantaged widows: existing non-attributable widows. Those whose husbands died from natural causes will still lose their pension should they elect to remarry or to cohabit. That small discrete group will still be forced to choose between financial well-being and happiness in a future relationship. We regard that as indefensible. The group at risk is tightly defined and small—in other words, the existing non-attributable widows and those tragically created between now and the introduction of the new pension scheme in about 2007. Only about half may be expected to remarry.
The Government have already conceded the principle that widow's pensions for life are appropriate. They introduced them in 2000 for one type of service widow—the attributable widow whose husband died as a result of service. At that time, existing widows were included retrospectively and the Government also planned to introduce such pensions for the other type—the non-attributable widows, but not including such existing widows.
If the Government do not take the one further small step of including existing non-attributable widows, they will wilfully create a new group of disadvantaged and aggrieved people and a serious and unnecessary fault line within the scheme. Indeed, I venture to suggest to the Minister that they will create a new legacy issue. It would be a small, magnanimous and entirely appropriate step—wholly in line with the Government's own agenda—to include existing non-attributable widows. The Government have rightly tried to create fairness in some respects, but long-standing inequity has been exposed, so they should use the opportunity provided by the new Bill with its new scheme to start afresh and correct that inequity.
The Minister's predecessor suggested that if we established a precedent under this scheme, there would be a read-across to all other public sector schemes, but I do not believe that that would happen. It has always been the Conservatives' submission—and, I believe, that of the Select Committee—that our armed forces not only are different, but need to be different. There should therefore be no automatic read-across. We must be allowed to make particular provision for a particular category of people whom the entire nation recognises as
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different from the rest of us. The commitment of the serviceman is unique, so I see no reason why we cannot make a unique case in this respect.
I do not accept that it will cost us billions of pounds to provide the scheme because other groups of public sector workers will then expect the same treatment. I hate using the expression "public sector workers" in respect of Her Majesty's armed forces. Servicemen are not public sector workers; that is not to decry such workers, but to deny comparability between the two. We know that members of the armed forces are unique.
A service widow is also unique in that the requirements of the service caused her to be disadvantaged while her husband was serving—she was often unable to earn an occupational pension because of the frequent requirement to follow the flag. It was often impossible to develop a long-term career. A splendid lady, Mrs. Jenny Green, whose husband died in a Tornado accident, persuasively put that case yesterday. As she said, it was Ministry of Defence policy to involve wives in welfare duties at any RAF station.
A friend of my parents used to be the commander at a RAF station in Germany. He married late in life and his wife rather resented the fact that she had not realised that she had joined the RAF by default. It was her job in a wholly unpaid capacity to act as the welfare officer, getting all the wives on the station together. That was the position that prevailed. Wives had to travel with their husbands and were unable to pursue a career. The husband's career often depended on his wife's involvement in the wider service. Today, the Government pay for welfare officers to do the job, but in the old days, they had the wives to do the job on the cheap, as it were, and many a wife and widow across the country will recognise what I am describing.
As Jenny Green also pointed out, stakeholder pensions are not a viable option for service wives and widows because they are often unable to build up a personal pension in their own right, as other civilian widows and wives have the opportunity to do, neither can they afford the full national insurance contribution for a full DSS widow's pension.
All in all, I hope that the Minister will accept that the people involved belong to a very specific category. They have been uniquely disadvantaged, and it would be sensible for us to make provision for them. The nation would be grateful as well.
In addition, those women who receive pensions at the moment lose them only if they remarry. There is therefore no question that the Government or the MOD will have more costs to bear if the new clause is accepted, as current payments will merely have to be maintained.
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