Torsten Bell

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Dame Siobhain, in a debate on such an important topic. We owe thanks to the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) for securing it, and I thank everybody who has contributed to it. Recent years have been difficult for pensioners. They, along with the rest of Britain, have had to wrestle with a cost of living crisis, inflation in double digits for the first time in four decades, food prices rising even faster, and energy bills that have shot up—as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned, before he mentioned that he is approaching a significant birthday. The debate is focused on whether it is 40 or 50, but we will celebrate whatever it is, as well as celebrating his form-filling success. Everyone who has spoken in the debate will have spoken to constituents about the challenges posed by the cost of living crisis. I have certainly spoken to some of the 17,000 pensioners in Swansea West. This is an important debate and, as well as responding to the points that Members have raised, I will cover: what lessons we can learn from the past, celebrating some things that have worked and recognising where they have not; what the Government are doing today to support pensioners, covering lots of the points raised by Members; and, briefly, our future priorities, as requested by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith). First, I will address the good news. In the 1990s, pensioner poverty was rampant. Almost 30% of UK pensioners were living in relative poverty. The old and the young—children—bore the brunt of the rise in poverty in the 1980s and early 1990s, but under the last Labour Government, not only did rates of pensioner poverty fall, but they had halved by the 2010 election. That did not happen by accident. Policy—including the introduction of pension credit, which we have discussed today—drove lots of that change, especially for women and older pensioners, and higher private pensions and employment rates further boosted pension incomes. But no one, of any party, thought that it was job done at that point, and I am sure that none of us thinks that today, not least because, in recent years, progress on pensioner poverty has stalled and relative pensioner poverty has risen by 300,000 since 2010. Even though today the UK has a lower rate of relative poverty among pensioners than the OECD average, the fact remains that, as Members have said, pensioner poverty is still too high. It is 16% in Wales, and it is especially high for renters. Almost 40% of all pensioners in poverty are renters, and with growing numbers of private renters, the challenge looks likely to grow, reinforcing the point that the hon. Members for South West Devon and for Mid Bedfordshire made about the need for long-term planning. There is another lesson from the last decade and a half: when growth stalls, the reductions in absolute pensioner poverty that we all used to take for granted slow or even grind to a halt, so growth matters for pensioners as it does for workers.