Boris Johnson thought he had got away with Parliament not being able to scrutinise his EU Withdrawal bill by calling an election. But on the last day of Parliament the House of Lords rumbled him and their analysis does not paint a pretty picture. Full report on Byline Times.
For purists actual House of Lords Constitution Committee report here.
A leaked document in today’s Guardian revealed what Conservative Central Office has said to all its Parliamentary candidates on how to avoid giving pledges to people during the election campaign.
It covers a wide variety of issues including Brexit, the NHS, trade deals, Voter ID, private schools, rivers, climate change and shooting. But a special section has been devoted to the Waspi campaign showing that MPs are acutely aware of the demands of 3.8 million who are waiting up to six years for a pension.
The section reproduced below includes a template letter to be sent to anybody inquiring what the Conservative candidate’s views are on paying women. So you needn’t bother writing as this will be the reply. It is more about future pensions – claiming that by 2030 pensioners will be £550 a year better off under the Conservatives. It also contains a 20 year old attack line on Labour reminding people that Gordon Brown once raised pensions by only 75p a week in 2000.
Rather extraordinarily there is one pledge all candidates can sign – that is supporting any rural sport especially shooting. Here candidates are free to support any pledges. This is almost Trumpian in its advice – put guns before pensioners.
My first article for Scarlet Standard – a new on line magazine for the Labour movement – highlights the plight of 3.8 million women born in the 1950s who are now waiting up to six years to get their pension.
Read it in full here. The gist is the present Tory government don’t plan to do anything about it – but the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party have got to up their game to get their vote. And there is everything to play for. And the women have the power to decide who could be elected.
As the manifesto season gears up – a very timely report today from the National Audit Office. It reveals David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto pledge to build 200,000 homes for first time buyers has resulted in not a single starter home being built. The full facts of this failed pledge are on Byline Times here.
One would expect the Department for Work and Pensions to fight not to pay 3.8 million women born in the 1950s any money for lost pensions. One would expect Guy Opperman, the pensions minister, and Therese Coffey, the secretary of state for work and pensions, who have good pensions themselves, not to be bothered.
But one would not expect the two MPs who head the All Party Parliamentary Group on State Pension Inequality to be in the vanguard of depriving millions of 1950s born women getting any money at all.
Yet that is precisely what Tim Loughton, Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, and Carolyn Harris, Labour MP for Swansea East are doing if you compare their proposals with official figures supplied by the Department for Work and Pensions of the demographic breakdown of the women affected. The figures were released to one my readers after a Freedom of Information request.
Their proposals, as I understand it, is to only offer compensation to women aged 63 and over, probably next year. If you take this point it means that all women born between April 1950 and December 1956 are excluded from getting a penny.
This means that in Great Britain (the DWP haven’t supplied the figures for Northern Ireland) if implemented next year it would only help 1.14 million women. And if you include Northern Ireland that means well over 2.5 million people will get nothing.
If the deal is delayed to 2021 just 770,000 in Great Britain will get any benefit and some 3 million people will get nothing.
Now for even those women how much will they will get. The official statement from them is vague about this.
However in an interview with the Daily Express Tim Loughton fleshed this out a bit more. It reports:
“The APPG thinks a more realistic solution would be to allow those affected to claim Job Seeker’s Allowance of £73.10 a week in addition to pension credit, while still being able to qualify for free bus passes and prescriptions. This plan would cost around £2bn. It has written to Chancellor Sajid Javid asking for money to be made available in autumn budget. “
In return Mr Loughton says BackTo60 should withdraw its request for permission to appeal at the High Court.
He is quoted as saying:”It would help if 1950s women would fall in behind a single practical doable solution which would make their case so much easier. I don’t think the legal route is going to get anywhere so the Government’s hand is not going to be forced by the courts. That was always a tall order and I think the judicial review result showed that. The most likely solution is a compromise.”
When you examine this ” compromise” it is asking 50s born women to buy a pig in a poke.
For a start the present full pension is £168 a week – so £73.10 on Jobseekers’ Allowance is less than half of that. Also it is not clear if the women had to sign on whether they would be forced to attend interviews, search for work etc.
Then pension credit will be only available to people over 66 in 2020 and not even then – if their partner is younger. So is the government’s going to change the rules or what? That can’t be done immediately in a Budget.
Finally and here is the rub when women get their pension – instead of the maximum £168 .10 they will only get £159 a week. For some it might be more than their contributions but for others it will be less. That is why I said earlier this amounts to the £73.10 a week being a loan for some which they are having to pay back with a reduced pension for life.
I would love to have had the opportunity to ask Tim Loughton and Carolyn Harris to explain this – but they have ignored my emails. My view is that they don’t want to spell it out because they want to con 50s born women into accepting this pathetic offer without realising what it is.
And there is the role of Waspi Ltd and its lobbyist Connect PA. WASPI Ltd seems to be an organisation pretending to have its supporters at heart but prepared to sell many of them down the river into permanent poverty. It has been receptive to the idea of the APPG compromise whereas BackTo60, We Paid In, You Pay Out, Waspi Campaign 2018 and Waspi Scotland want nothing to do with it.
Women do have one strong card – the December 12 General Election. They can decided to vote out both of the MPs if they want to.
Tim Loughton has 6100 women in his constituency who have lost out and a majority of only 5106 over Labour. Much will depend on the views of the Labour candidate Lavinia O’Connor and whether she would support full restitution.
Carolyn Harris has 4800 women affected in her constituency but a much larger majority of 13,168 over the Tory candidate.
Whatever happens the general election campaign this does give women the power to demand something is done for them and plenty of opportunity to campaign against those who have let them down.
Claims by Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, that the UK’s biggest independent trade deal with Korea hit the ” gold standard” are ruthlessly exposed by a House of Lords committee. The full story on Byline Times here reveals that government’s claims we would be better outside the EU for trade are suspect – and ministers don’t want them properly scrutinised by Parliament.
Another day. Another taxpayer disaster for the Conservatives. This time it is the National Audit Office reporting on the full cost of Michael Gove’s failed vocational education initiative which cost taxpayers £800m and left a trail of brand new closed colleges. Read the horrendous details of this latest scandal on Byline Times here.
Today I have decided to highlight one of my angry blog supporters who lives in Spain and is a victim of the pension scandal that has seen 3.8 million 50s women waiting up to six years to get their pension.
So outraged at the Prime Minister refusing to consider any compensation for the women that she has written to complain to Boris Johnson and highlight how much money he and his ministers have wasted after researching the bills.
As she puts it: ” Had we run our household budgets as you have run yours, we would have lost or homes and been made bankrupt yet you are able to get away with it. You will get extremely good Pensions unlike the true workers of the country who get the smallest Pension in Europe. I actually don’t know how you can sleep at night!
Carole Irwin lives in the mountains behind Malaga. She tells me :
” I am 60 years old and during my working life paid NI payments whilst working as a nurse for several years, and as a civilian in the Police Service. I then brought up my children, so received child benefit credits for those years.
I moved to Spain to retire with my family 14 years ago. 6 years ago l was diagnosed with an incurable and life changing illness. This costs me between 80€ and 90€ in medications per month alone.
This is why I became a member of #WePaidInYouPayOut which has been supporting Back to 60.
….I am one of the many who has received no letter informing me of this change. When I started working it was on the understanding although only an assumed agreement that I would receive my pension at 60.This change of retirement age along with my illness has affected our plans for our future life in Spain. “
This is her full letter to Mr Johnson:
” I am writing to you as l have many concerns about the enormous amounts of money being wasted by Government’s various departments.
In order to be concise l am writing it in bullet points so as not to waste your time.
Firstly Chris Grayling ( who possibly has wasted the most money) who has served in several roles during his time in government and unbelievably still is employed as
Secretary of State for Transport of the United Kingdom
(2016 to 2019). Had he been employed in the private sector would have been dismissed as his record shows how incapable he actually is!
*Chris Grayling alone has so far wasted almost 3 billion pounds of public money…
*At least £500 million to sort out the mess he made when attempting to privatise the probation service (source: National Audit Office)
*£33 million when sued by Eurotunnel over Seaborne Freight fiasco (source: The Guardian)
*£38 million – cost to the economy in the north of England due to the rail chaos in July 2018 (source The London Economic)
*£50,000 on the failed ‘lorry jam’ Brexit exercise in Kent (source: The Guardian)
*£70,000 on failed attempt to ban books from prisons (source: The Independent)
*£2 billion cost to taxpayers on the collapse of Virgin Trains east coast franchise (source The London Economic)
*£15 million a year in additional costs to the Carillion contract to run facilities management in prisons (source The London Economic)
*£5 million on ‘wasted rail fares’ for HS2 staff (source: Huffington Post)
*£50 million on cancelled No Deal ferry contracts (source: The Guardian)
*£32 million of charges that were unlawfully collected – which the government were ordered to pay back (source The London Economic)
*£23 million contract to develop a new generation of GPS tracking tags for dangerous offenders written off because the project proved “too challenging” (source The London Economic)
*£60 million over the £130 million original budget on the electronic tagging programme – described by the PAC as a “catastrophic waste of public money” (source The London Economic)
More government waste is shown by the Tax payers alliance.
Although excellent work has been undertaken by the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group in terms of finding savings, taxpayers’ cash has still been wasted in a number of ways, with significant sums ripe for being saved in many areas, including:
*£53 billion – Additional cost of funding pay and pensions for public sector workers over and above the private sector average, based on analysis of figures from the Office for National Statistics and the Pension Policy Institute
*£25 billion – Amount wasted through inefficient public sector procurement and poor use of outsourcing, based on an authoritative report from the Institute of Directors
*£20.3 billion – Cost to the economy of public sector fraud, according to the National Fraud Authority
*£5 billion – Amount paid in benefits to those with an income in excess of £100,000
*£4 billion – Losses to the taxpayer from RBS and the sale of Northern Rock£2.9 billion – Amount spent needlessly by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and Department for Culture, Media & Sport, which should both be scrapped
*£1.2 billion – Annual subsidy to foreign farmers through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy
The planning of the London garden bridge cost £58 million without so much as a pot plant being placed!
These figures are also almost certainly an underestimate. A rigorous assessment of the public sector efficiency commissioned by the European Central Bank found that if the UK’s bloated public sector were as efficient as that in the economies of countries like the US, Australia, and Japan, no less than £137 billion could have been saved in the last year! Those is a Huge amount of money!
In addition to the big ticket items, we have identified hundreds of examples of smaller sums being wasted. It is, however, all still taxpayers’ money and there is no excuse for waste, regardless of the amount involved. Among the culprits identified are:
Arts Council: Gave a £95,000 grant to artists in Brighton for “Skip”, a rubbish dumpster outlined with yellow lights!
Crawley Council: Spent £5,070 on 12,200 hot drinks from vending machines for council employees, when the equivalent number of tea bags would have cost just £200!
Department for International Development: Spent £21.2 million on a road maintenance project in Bangladesh, later pulled due to “fiduciary irregularities” after it emerged that less than 10% had actually been spent on roads!
Durham Council: Funded a £12,000 clothing allowance to allow councillors to wear “Geordie Armani”!
Hull Council: Spent £40,000 on a concert in honour of the councillor who is Lord Mayor this year!
Ministry of Defence: Paid £22 for light bulbs that are normally 65p!
Prison Service: Paid £720,000 to professional actors for role playing that is aimed at helping inmates become employed.
Scottish Government: Signed a £1.4 million 4-year contract for taxis for civil servants in Edinburgh – despite staff being told to use buses.
Stoke-on-Trent Council: Spent £330,000 to pay for redundancy packages and subsequently rehiring 25 members of staff.
All this money wasted by your government was paid for by the hard working tax payers and I’m sure if l did more research l could find many more examples.
One being to your own embarrassment the purchasing of water cannons. I wonder what they were worth at the local scrap dealer?
There are a great many extremely angry women not yet receiving their hard earned Pensions which was paid for by themselves throughout their lives by paying national insurance.
I’m sure they would not have chosen to waste so much money in the way you did, as had that money still been available you could have decided we earned and deserved our pensions.
Had we run our household budgets as you have run yours, we would have lost or homes and been made bankrupt yet to are able to get away with it. You will get extremely good Pensions unlike the true workers of the country who get the smallest Pension in Europe. I actually don’t know how you can sleep at night!
Due to the appalling waste as listed above, please do it get too comfortable in your role as Prime Minister as l have a strong feeling come the next general election you will have many people choosing not to vote for your incompetent and cruel party.”
On Byline next month I am planning to try and see how much money the PM has also wasted on the No Deal Brexit which increasingly looks unlikely to happen on October 31. This can be added to the figures she has researched.
But I thought it was worth publishing this gigantic list because it highlights the anger people feel about this issue and the waste of taxpayers money by politicians. No doubt the reply will be stuck in a queue in the PM’s correspondence unit. But wider publication will not allow him so easily to get away with it. Nor should he.
Very informative report from the National Audit Office out today on the state of fracking and how it is being held back by unprecedented numbers of protestors and objectors. Read the story here.
The BackTo60 organisation which represents 3.8 million women who face up to six years delay to get their pension has lodged its application for permission to appeal at the High Court.
The decision to go ahead comes on the back of a successful crowd funding appeal which has raised over £70,000 of the £72,000 in a week. The fund raising is to remain open as it will have to cover both the legal action and further campaigning.
The mass media coverage in the Daily Mail and the Express following the judgement by Lord Justice Irvine and Mrs Justice Whipple to turn down the judicial review on all grounds to compensate the women has boosted interest in the case. Perversely the damning judgement created a wave of sympathy for the women and spread the word to a much wider audience.
Lawyers advising the group including Michael Mansfield have decided there are good grounds for appeal but will have to develop their case in seeking permission to appeal.
No date has been fixed yet for a hearing.
Meanwhile BackTo60 is receiving support from people who used to support the original Waspi campaign but now feel they are no longer interested in helping the bulk of the women who are affected by the big rise in the pension age.
One is Lizzie Spring, a former co-ordinator for Waspi in London.
She told me: ” I’m gobsmacked by the JR. I expected some restitution of our lost income, if not back to 60 at least back to the State Pension Age changes added in 2011. The tone and content of the ruling seems so adamantly ignorant of most women’s lives for the past fifty years. Some of it is risible. Men are discriminated against because women were expected to retire early from paid work, to do the housework, cook and provide them with company? Women’s financial and domestic inequality and lack of opportunities are cultural norms?
” It is shocking that two very materially wealthy people that nobody has elected into power, have the right to inflict such beliefs on so many women. I am not coping with the situation well. It is bewildering to me and almost impossible to believe highly educated people really view women’s historical poverty and imposed inequality in this way. I’m also of course personally still facing being poor my whole old age so I’m frightened and furious about the outcome too.”
She is also scathing about the offer being negotiated with Therese
Coffey , the works and pensions secretary, by the two joint chairs of the All Party Parliamentary Group on behalf of Waspi Ltd.
” It means accepting a lower pension and only some compensation after the age of 63 I think it’s a disappointment. It risks compounding the poverty of women with the least money who might take such an offer out of desperation. It contains nothing to support the many women who’ve cashed in small private pensions and/or sold homes to survive for five plus years. The compensation after 63 would take ages to implement even if accepted and if not even backdated, would not be compensation but just a sop for a few. Those of us who’ve finally got state pensions but have spent all our lifetime savings while waiting, will presumably just continue to live in poverty, which is pretty bleak.”
Nor is she impressed by Boris Johnson seeking her vote
“Johnson’s entire shtick is being untrustworthy and it’s an embarrassment having him as PM. I’d not vote Tory anyway so his predictable betrayal of 1950s women doesn’t affect my vote.”
And she is interested in the idea of using a Special Temporary Measure in Parliament to compensate the women : “It’s quite exciting on first viewing. But If it’s used as a route it will need to be done with huge amounts of hard evidence.
“Whoever presented the case would need a great deal of sensitive intelligence in relation to how much women are apparently still resented if we ask for equality. If decisions are made by people with no understanding of inter-sectional discrimination it’ll likely have the same outcome. “
The signs are despite a campaign to try and suggest that the settlement being negotiated with the government by the two MPs Carolyn Harris and Tim Loughton is the only game in town, people are starting to vote with their feet and backing groups that want full restitution.
Westminster Confidential 