So a century is a long time in politics. On 28 October 1908 the suffragettes ‘rushed’ the House of Commons to protest in favour of votes for women. On 29 October 2008 the government – in response to sustained but peaceful lobbying by the Women and Pensions Consortium (a coalition of MPs, peers, Labour’s Helen Jackson, Baroness Hollis, the Fabian Women’s Network and third sector and stakeholder organisations under the Human Rights Commission’s wide umbrella) – quietly introduced the buy-back amendment to the pensions bill, giving women extra rights to build up equal state pension entitlement.
How both campaigns mirror the respective political status quo. With votes for women, women were on the outside looking in, and as strangers to parliament in every sense adopted the campaign tactics of the dispossessed – bricks through windows, matches in pillar boxes, prison hunger strikes. Contrast this to the active engagement of work and pensions secretary James Purnell and his predecessor John Hutton with the Women and Pensions Consortium in the three-year-long consultative dialectic which resulted in Labour’s new settlement for women reaching the statute book last year.
Equal chances, equal entitlement and a vision of fairness are the hallmark of Labour’s new pensions structure. Embracing the buy-back amendment reaffirms Labour as the party for women and the family. Gordon Brown’s generous earnings-linked safety net of means-tested pension credit has already lifted 1.9 million pensioners (many of them women) from a Conservative legacy of absolute poverty. Labour’s next achievement will be to credit women’s social and economic contributions to society into their state pensions.
Labour’s radical new reforms will result, for the first time ever, in 75 per cent of women retiring on a full basic state pension, in their own right, in 2010 (up from around 35 per cent now) with an extra million people, mostly women, building up entitlement to the second state pension. About 90 per cent of men retire on a full basic state pension, the foundation of all secure retirement saving. Under the government’s reforms, 90 per cent of women will do so by 2025.
Gender pension disparity stems from 70 per cent of unpaid caring and two-thirds of childcare being undertaken by women. Unpaid carers, keeping elderly and disabled friends and relatives out of hospitals and care homes, save the state £87bn a year, almost the annual cost of the NHS.
Compounded by the gender pay gap, caring impacts on a woman’s ability to earn and save for a pension. The buy-back amendment rebalances the national insurance rules for gender equity to increase the number of women attaining a full basic state pension. The new right to make up to six extra years’ worth of voluntary contributions at retirement (for contributors with at least 20 national insurance years) is over and above the existing right to buy back the immediate last six national insurance years. Earlier missed years, due to childcare, may often only be discovered at retirement when it is too late for a woman to buy them back. (Women have less access to pension advice).
From the word go with New Labour, which swept to power in 1997 with 101 women MPs, gender equality has been high on the political agenda. The women and pensions consultation itself represents the shattering of another political glass ceiling. Women are not now on the outside looking in but on the inside, located at the core and the centre of the agenda.