Dan Tomlinson

First, I echo the comments of others in praising the Minister for his work on this issue over decades in this place. I saw it before becoming a Member of Parliament during my time working in the charity sector at the Resolution Foundation and most recently at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I was working on these issues, and I always knew then that we had a friend in Parliament who cared deeply about the welfare system and about the needs of people receiving benefits and support from the state, and who also, like me, wants to see more people being supported to move into employment. Even though I am not going to focus on that topic today as I want to talk about pensions, I do want to put on record my thanks for his service, and I am glad to see him as a Minister. I want to start by talking about an institution that is not often discussed in this place but that is crucial to all of our lives and shapes a lot of politics even though we do not remark on it too much: the family. That is the institution that almost all of us are closest to and that shapes so much of the way we see the world. It is important that we as policymakers—as people sitting here in the House of Commons—do not just think of individuals as people on their own who are separate from one another and that we instead remember that we all exist in families. If we look at someone’s biography online, it might say they are a father and a husband, because our families are a big part of our identities. We would do well to remember that. Sometimes our politics and our media might want to push us into discussing pensions in a way that promotes the salience of a war between the generations, but nothing could be further from the truth.