Westminster diary
October 30, 2004
(From Highbury and Islington Express)
It is good news that the new re-cycling centre is open at last. Our Borough has a poor record on recycling, with one of the lowest records in inner London. The new depot can only improve matters.
The high rates of participation in paper, glass and metal recycling show that there is a huge public understanding and demand for this. The new centre will extend to other things, including green waste. I am particularly pleased it will include batteries as well as motor oil and mobile phones. Camden, by contrast, has had a superb re-cycling centre in Kentish Town for years, which has shown what is possible with the determination to achieve it.
As a country, we have improved over the past few years, but are still the lowest in Western Europe for recycling, and do far too much landfill. Every day barges pass parliament down the Thames taking pulverised waste to be dropped in the North Sea which was once seen as a progressive move, but is deeply pollutive and should be stopped. Denmark, Holland, Germany and France do much better on re-cycling than us, and have in some cases returned to the re-usable bottle rather than crushing glass and using the cullet to make new bottles and jars. Ireland has got rid of the waste from plastic bags by charging for them, and encouraging the use of paper instead.
I welcome the improvements but we have a long way to go to meet our targets.
The hurricanes in the Caribbean have had huge publicity, and whilst in one sense they are normal for this time of the year, their effects are not. Preparation and awareness are crucial but there are human factors. The flooding in Haiti is disastrous, and made worse by de-forestation as the sponge effect of trees is lost. This factor also applies in Britain, as the recent floods in Devon and the annual flooding of the River Severn starkly demonstrates.
Sure Start, the Government’s programme for ensuring all children have a decent start in life, has had good effects locally. Agreement has been reached to go ahead with more children’s centres. I am particularly pleased about are The Factory in Newington Green and the Hornsey Road Baths site. The Council, disgracefully and without consultation, sold the freehold of The Factory to a property company, and this put the whole centre and the new children’s centre at risk. Well done Sure Start! Congratulations also to Mitford Under-Fives which has given brilliant service and support to generations from the World War Two prefabs in Sussex Way, and at last will go to a spanking new building on the baths site next to the Fire Station.
Pre school provision is very important, not just to enable parents and carers to work, but for the social development of children. Things have improved a lot thanks to huge sums of Government money and a priority for this, but there is a long way to go. For working parents, provision is expensive, both at nurseries and after school play centres. I wish the Council would be more realistic about this. Too many children miss out on the after-school clubs due to cost.
Community Centres are the very fabric of our lives for many people. The Whittington Centre adjacent to Whittington Park is a good example: busy, vibrant and varied with luncheon clubs, after school, church and local groups all making the best of it. Last Friday there was a good gathering to say thanks to George Brade, who has retired as caretaker after 18 and a half years. Always cheerful and always there, he has supported all the groups and taught generations to play steel band. He’s been a good friend to the youth of the area. His Barbadian warmth and humour will not be lost - he is dedicating himself to the Whittington Steel Band and local music. Thanks and well done George!
I am constantly aware of crime and the fear of crime. The scheme promoted by the Mayor and the Police of Neighbourhood Policing is clearly working. The dedicated team in Mildmay are having a great effect and are very popular, as was obvious at the Mayville open day. Finsbury Park is the next to get its special team from March. I attended a meeting at the Andover Centre chaired by Councillor Lisa Spall where residents raised their serious concerns at drug dealing and other crimes in the area. Hopefully the Government money into estate improvements and security will help, along with a dedicated local Policing team. What would, I suspect, make an equally helpful contribution would be the provision of adequate local youth facilities. The Council must get real about the lack of youth clubs and the crying need for more detached youth workers.
Parliament resumed for two weeks at the beginning of September and was dominated by the ongoing issue of Iraq. In my view, the policy of illegal invasion was wrong, and the aftermath has been the growth of terrorism of a kind unknown in the country before. I support a policy of planned withdrawal, and if international support is requested it should come through the United Nations. The US presence has been accompanied by terrible losses of life on all sides, and huge profits for American contractors.
One bit of good news. In one day the House of Commons voted through the Hunting Bill to end the barbarity of Blood Sports - as one who has opposed Fox Hunting from my Shropshire childhood, I was delighted to be part of a majority putting this measure through. It does not end country life - drag hunting is doing well in Scotland, without the brutality of the “kill”.
Pensions debate
October 20, 2004
Adair Turner and his esteemed colleagues, Jennie Drake from the Communication Workers Union and John Hills from the London School of Economic, have done an excellent job in presenting the facts around the whole pension debate. Their report (Pensions Commission; Challenges and Choices) is an excellent presentation of a bewildering array of facts surrounding the pension debate in the UK.
The more one reads of the problems in funding occupational pension schemes and the low rate of the state pension, the more one thinks back to the debates over the past thirty years surrounding this issue.
What constantly stands out is the visionary approach taken by Barbara Castle and the Labour Government of 1974 to ‘79, in the landmark Social Security Act of 1975. This established the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme to cover those not enjoying the umbrella of an occupational scheme, and it pledged to raise the state pension annually in line with earnings, or prices, whichever was the higher thereafter. The effects of this were soon apparent when by 1980 the state pension was at a record high in proportion to earnings.
The incoming Thatcher Government of 1979 had other ideas. Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, wrote in his memoirs that his single greatest achievement was the breaking of the link between pensions and earnings in his first budget in 1980. This led to a downward spiral of the value of the state pension. As if this move was not bad enough, the 1986 Social Security Act devalued SERPS, to encourage participants to leave it and create a market for personal portable pension schemes. Pouring scorn on the European norm of a high level of state pension provision, the (then) Secretary of State, Norman Fowler, talked grandly of people controlling their own lives and destinies. His deputy, John Major, duly pushed the legislation through Parliament.
This bitter pill is still being swallowed. High pressure mis-selling of pensions created breakdowns and misery, and the reliance on stock market values has become a bitter pill for many who have been left with almost nothing despite paying in for years. New Labour dropped Labour’s traditional commitment to the re-linking of pensions with earning in the run up to the 1997 election, preferring instead to promise a Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG) for pensioners and to attack the worst aspects of mis-selling.
The introductions of MIG, now called Pensioner Credit, has brought the basic income level to £105.45 per week, but it has to be claimed, and is means tested. The winter fuel allowance is universal and non means tested, and in response to Council Tax rises last year, Gordon Brown’s budget added £100, to mitigate the hardship, for one year.
The problem now is that many pensioners still live in poverty due to a combination of low occupational pensions, a benefit trap that prevents access to Council and Housing Benefit allowances, and women who did not pay the full stamp during their working lives not getting a full pension. There is also a huge problem of many isolated elderly, who do not claim the Pension Credit to which they are entitled, as it is means tested.
The first and very important message is that universal benefits have a high take up rate and are cheaper to administer. Memories of the social fund discretionary payments from the 1986 Act linger, when its administrative cost was forty per cent of its value. The argument that universal benefits favour the wealthy is nonsense; income tax is there to deal with that.
Existing pensioners need a much better deal, and the demands of the National Pensioners Convention, for re-linking with earnings are vital as is their demand for a 33 per cent rise in the basic pension above the Pension Credit level.
However, the Pension Commission is looking at the future, and taking submissions until January on the next phase of the process.
The Independent, in one of its brilliant stark front pages on the day of the Commission’s Report, set out a few facts.
The big figure is £57 billion; the difference between the amount saved and the amount needed to pay out of all the pension schemes. One million pensioners (over 10 per cent) live below the poverty line. The really telling figure is that of public spending.
Britain spends five per cent of its GDP on pensions; the average European figure is 11 per cent. Britain does, of course, spend more than almost anyone else on arms and defence.
In the debate on how future pensions are funded, there are essentially two broad strands.
There are those who see the main thrust being individual savings for a decent pension – the most commonly quoted figure being 12% of earnings from the age of 25. As one young graduate memorably put it on television, that means it is necessary to start saving for your pension before you have paid off your student loan.
If the response to the Commission is to do nothing, the number of poor pensioners will rapidly rise.
The days of the low state provision being complimented by private provision are ending, and something has to be done.
The Commission, in its summary of Chapter 4, on Pension Adequacy, clearly states “it is highly likely that the muddle through option will produce outcomes, both less socially equitable and less economically efficient than we could achieve with a consciously planned response to the problems we face”.
The choice is moral and political. Does the community as a whole have a responsibility to its older people or not? Almost nobody would answer no to the question, but the planned decline in state provision leaves open the next question as to how we prepare for the future.
State provision funded by taxation is by far the most fair way of providing for the long term, and is part of a philosophy that the community as a whole should care for all. Socialist values are under threat – the failure of the private pension system and the poverty it leaves for those on the margins is more than adequate testament to the direction we must follow.
