Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Lords, 2021-10-26
Topic: Social Welfare
Jean Lesley Patricia Drake (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 3. To quote from a publication by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, "We’ll know we are on the way to levelling up when differences in health and life expectancy across the country start to drop. Sadly, that’s one measure of inequality that has clearly been moving in the wrong direction over the past decade." Associated with those growing inequalities is pensioner poverty, which, as we have heard, has risen from 13% to 18% and is likely to rise even further. For older pensioners, the rise is even higher. With the rising energy and food costs that we can all see coming down the track, there will be a lot of old people this winter with very little money, sitting in cold houses, fearing that they will not get any help when they fall ill. That will be the reality for many thousands of people in the coming winter months We know that there is a major problem generally of households on low incomes with rising debt who will not be able to weather the storm of the growing cost-of-living problems that we are beginning to see. Then again, looked at from a regional perspective, in the majority of regions in England pensioner couples have average weekly incomes below the pensioner couple average, and we are seeing this problem in particular regions: in the north-east, the north-west, east Midlands, West Midlands, Yorkshire and indeed in London, which now has the highest relative level of pensioner poverty. As Imperial College research now shows us, life expectancy is falling in urban areas in these regions—in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and other areas. Cuts to health and social spending will have contributed to that trend, and we have not yet experienced a winter with the backlog that the NHS is dealing with. Pensioners with low incomes are more sensitive to indexation changes because they are more dependent for their income on those benefits. Yet we have seen no assessment of the impact of suspending the triple lock, or indeed what could be the implications of decisions the Government will take next year or the year after, given that through the Bill they have suspended both the triple lock and the legislative underpin of earnings. We know that projected levels of pensioner poverty will vary according to the uprating provisions applied to the state pension, given its dominance in pensioner income. If you play negatively with pensioner income, pensioner poverty will go up. That sensitivity to indexation will continue to increase, as fewer and fewer pensioners reach state pension age without the generous defined benefits or defined contribution pensions which, in the past, cushioned the fall in the state pension that occurred under successive Governments Pensioner poverty is not a legacy issue. State pension is and remains a dominant source of income for the majority of both current and future pensioners. Research by the Pensions Policy Institute—your Lordships can tell that I am a governor—reveals that the UK is currently on course for a quarter of people approaching retirement being unlikely to receive even a minimum income. Of the 11 million people in the UK between the age of 50 and state pension age, around 3 million will not receive a minimum income.