Torsten Bell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and for his brief congratulations on my appointment prior to his wider comments. I would say gently that he and I both stood on the same manifesto which did not promise to provide compensation, and lots of Members have talked about trust in this Chamber. There was a clear choice not to make that promise in the manifesto.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  No, I will not. The biggest betrayal of our older generations is the state of our health service. We will also boost the state pension by up to £1,900 by the end of this Parliament. As the new Pensions Minister, I know that nothing is more important than providing a foundation for the secure retirement that everyone deserves after a lifetime of work.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  I was not going to go into this detail, but the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings is inviting me to return to some of my past lives with the details of surveys. The 43% figure that he is referring to refers to all women. What the ombudsman did not do is look at the same survey and look at the women who were affected by this change, who were obviously slightly later in life and much more likely to know about their state pension age. That is where the higher figures I am quoting come from. It is from the same survey as used by the ombudsman, but it is focused on the women who are actually affected by the change.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  I must make some progress. We also do not believe that paying a flat rate to all women would be a fair or proportionate use of taxpayers’ money. I want to address the questions asked by several hon. Members about the specific research findings. It is important to say that the evidence on what women knew about the state pension age changes is robust. The same research was used by the ombudsman, who clearly did not have concerns about its validity. I have heard hon. Members make powerful speeches today and I understand the strength of feeling on this issue, not least from my aunt. Many women born in the 1950s worked hard in paid jobs, often balancing that with raising a family. The Government have a responsibility to take their concerns seriously, which is why Ministers listened, reflected and carefully considered this complex decision. As custodians of the public purse, however, we must also ensure that decisions are rooted in evidence and are fair to everyone. The fact remains that the vast majority of women knew that the state pension age was increasing. Even for those who did not, we know that sending letters earlier would not have made a difference in most cases. [ Interruption. ] Although I know that that decision will be disappointing, as we are hearing, and many have been frustrated by watching this debate drag on for years, we believe it is the right course of action. Of course, it is also right that the Government should be held to account for that decision, as is happening today.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  We have already had a long statement in the main Chamber. The point of debates like this one today is to make sure that the Government are held accountable for their decisions.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. The Labour party did oppose the acceleration of the state pension age in the early part of the last decade, but he and many other Members will have noticed very viscerally that the Labour party lost many elections since then. Parliament made a decision and the courts have since endorsed that decision. There was maladministration and we must learn the lessons.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  It is an important issue, and we have been listening to the plight of those women for many years—and rightly so. Important and powerful cases have been made by many hon. Members, but I have set out why the Government have made that decision. We will continue to help women born in the 1950s and pensioners across the UK by investing a crucial £22 billion into NHS England this year and next, with consequentials for the Welsh and Scottish Governments.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend on two fronts for his intervention. First, because he has reinforced the point that I just made, which was that we are struggling to distinguish between the rights and wrongs of the original decision about the state pension age, the equalisation in 1995, the acceleration in 2011 and the ombudsman’s report, which is focused narrowly on the communication of those decisions. On a second front, he reminds us that it was in fact George Osborne who said that the acceleration of the state pension rises was the single biggest saving that he made. He boasted about it, but that is a separate issue.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under you today, Dr Murrison. I thank the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) for securing a debate on this important topic. I also thank him, if slightly less enthusiastically, for its timing, which is on my first day in office. That fact also explains the delay in answering the named day question put by the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), which he referred to in his contribution to the debate. I am under no illusion that everyone in this Chamber, or almost everyone in this Chamber, will agree with everything that I am about to say. However, all of us who have listened to this debate and to the important points made by right hon. and hon. Members have benefited from it, and we all recognise the context of this debate, which is the squeeze on living standards that has affected women born in the 1950s just as it has the entire country. The issues that we are discussing today are important to many women, including my aunt in west Wales, who was born in 1955 and who pays particularly close attention to these issues. I spoke to her last night as part of my preparation for this debate and she would agree with the points made by the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood), and by my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), that women of her generation have faced many difficulties and particular discrimination. People have spoken powerfully about that. It is therefore right that this debate gives the long-held concerns of those women the consideration they deserve, just as it was right that the Government considered those concerns in making the decision that we are debating today. That is also why my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Emma Reynolds), was the first Minister in eight years to meet WASPI Ltd, why the Government considered the ombudsman’s investigations and reports in detail, and why we look closely at what Parliament has said on this subject. Although I understand that the outcome was disappointing for many, the decision was based on the evidence. Before I set out how we reached that decision, as the hon. Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger) requested, it is worth reiterating the point that several Members have made: the ombudsman’s report was not about the decision in 1995 to increase the state pension age for women, or the decision in 2011 to accelerate that increase. Those decisions were the focus of remarks by many Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck). They were taken by Parliament, including by many Members who are here today, and they were upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2020.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Women’s Changed State Pension Age: Compensation · Hansard source

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  I really must make some progress because we are about to run out of time. It would not be a reasonable or fair use of taxpayer money to pay compensation to people whose circumstances would be the same today even if the maladministration had never occurred. A compensation scheme would cost up to £10.5 billion, less than the scheme previously proposed by the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) but still a significant amount. The ombudsman is clear that, as a matter of principle, redress and compensation should normally reflect individual impact. The Department considered at length whether a tailored scheme could be delivered, but it was simply not a viable option. The ombudsman’s report acknowledges the cost and administrative burden of assessing the individual circumstances of 3.5 million women born in the 1950s. Indeed, it took the ombudsman nearly six years to investigate just the six sample cases. To set up a scheme and invite 3.5 million women to set out their detailed personal circumstances would take years and thousands of staff.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Public Finances: Borrowing Costs · Hansard source

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  I thank the Chief Secretary for his response. I have just sat through Transport questions, or some of them, during which I repeatedly heard calls for more spending from Conservative Members, but they oppose every single tax rise to pay for that spending. Does the Chief Secretary agree that one of the lessons from global developments in recent days is that we must pay for day-to-day public spending through tax rises, however tough that is?

• 11 Dec 2024 · NHS Waiting Lists · Hansard source

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  The Welsh Budget yesterday announced significant extra funding for the NHS in Wales. I am surprised: why are the parties on the Opposition Benches voting against it?

• 11 Dec 2024 · Finance Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member seems to be making the case that he has been seeing a pilot for this national policy in his own constituency, with higher fees, which presumably funded that £200,000 a year grant to the state school, paid by the attendees of the private school. His example therefore makes the case for exactly the Government’s policy on a wider scale.

• 4 Dec 2024 · Employer National Insurance Contributions · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the shadow Chancellor for giving way, even if I cannot quite believe what I am hearing. Anyone boasting about the economic record of the previous Government, particularly in the immediate run-up to the last election, should read this week’s release from the Office for National Statistics on the reweighted labour force survey. It shows that productivity in the year running up to the election fell by 0.9%. That was in just one year. That is what economic failure looks like.

• 4 Dec 2024 · Employer National Insurance Contributions · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member has raised the issue of business confidence, which I have heard a few times from Opposition Members. That leaves me pondering why, if businesses were so confident under the previous Government, we had the lowest private sector business investment in the entire G7, and the only country in the OECD that saw lower levels of private investment was Greece.

• 27 Nov 2024 · Finance Bill · Hansard source

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  I wish to reflect on the tone of the shadow Minister’s remarks. Looking at chart 4.5 in the OBR’s document, I can see a big rise in the tax to GDP ratio, but from the right hon. Gentleman’s indignant tone, one would think that there had never been a tax rise under the previous Government. What the chart shows is a significantly larger rise in the tax to GDP ratio, because of the decisions taken by the previous Government, so is it not the case that the right hon. Gentleman’s tone does not reflect the facts of the decisions he took?

• 11 Nov 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T6. Carers matter, including the 3,400 carers in Swansea West, so I welcome the significant move in the Budget to increase the amount that carers can earn while retaining carer’s allowance. History tells us that awareness of the rules is low, so what plans does the Department have to communicate this important, major policy change to carers?

• 31 Oct 2024 · Income tax (charge) · Hansard source

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  Hear, hear.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Lady give way?

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I praise my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall) for his speech and for his reference to Alistair Darling, who would indeed think that not being serious was the worst thing that could possibly happen. But he also would have had his definition of seriousness, which would be saying that on a day when we have a huge Budget like this and people will be spending their time going through all the weeds—I promise you, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is sorely tempting —we should focus on the big picture choices that have been made, because those are the choices that will define not just this Budget, but this Parliament and this Government. I will touch on two of those choices today: first, the choice that the state of the public finances and public services cannot continue as it is today; and, secondly, the choice that we cannot continue to be a country living off our past rather than investing in our future. Those are the choices of this Budget, and the fact that Opposition Members are not in their place shows that they do not know what their choices are and they do not have answers to those questions. Let me turn first to the public finances and public services. We all live in parts of the country where people are not getting the operations they need, where crimes are not being investigated, and where prisons are overflowing and do not have the places we need them to. In order to turn that situation around, tax rises are inevitable, and we will start to do that through the tough but fair choices set out by the Chancellor today. Several Opposition Members have suggested that our position on the public finances is a looser perspective, but the truth is that the fiscal rules we have set on current spending today relate to a target that was not met once —not in one single year—under the previous Conservative Government. I think most Opposition Members know that public services are not sustainable and that they left the public finances in bad shape. The peak of austerity was back in 2018, and they knew then that it could not be sustained politically or indeed socially, because they promised to bring austerity to an end. But it has not felt like austerity has been brought to an end. Yes, that is partly due to difficult circumstances, from covid to the cost surges on energy, but it is also because the previous Government were distracted, promising tax cuts while delivering tax rises. I invite all hon. Members to turn to chart 4.5 in the OBR document to recognise that the tax rises put in place by the previous Government were much larger than the tax rises that have had to be announced, regrettably, by the Chancellor today. If tax rises are the death of growth, the tax rises that the country is living with are Tory tax rises. This is not just about tax; the previous Government were also promising public service improvements without allocating the public spending to make them a reality, as the OBR has laid out clear and bare today. We all know the result. Public services are worse today than they were in 2018, and the spending plans we inherited would have made them worse still, with £1 in every £10 cut from day-to-day public service spending. None of us thinks that is possible, so we have made a different choice. We have chosen to take tough but fair choices on tax and to put in the spending that is needed, including £1.7 billion for Wales. Let me turn to the second choice that I outlined at the start of my speech: the choice to invest. We cannot carry on living off our past rather than investing in our future, and even if that were ever an option, it is not today, after we have done so for three long decades. The previous Government were planning a cut of a third in net investment—over £20 billion a year. Why? Yes, because politics of all stripes has short-termist incentives, but also because for too long our macroeconomic framework has had a heavy bias against investment spending built in. Fiscal rules have driven cuts whenever bad news has arrived, which drives problems in the volume of investment—the average OECD country has invested 50% more than us this century—and in the volatility of investment. That was what the previous Government were planning, and that weak investment undermines growth. It has been said a lot today that business will not like every measure in the Budget, and it may not, but we need to be clear that business investment in Britain has been lower than in every other G7 economy in previous years. Why? Because of a lack of stability, from Liz Truss to Boris Johnson; because things cannot be built; because we cannot get the workers; because we have run down the NHS and people are too sick to work. It is true that this is a big Budget and there are big choices that we have to recognise. How do we deliver stable public finances? How do we deliver functioning public services? How do we deliver an investment programme that underpins growth, rather than undermining it? We should all agree that those are the questions facing the country, and the Tories lost the election because they did not even try to answer them. On the basis of today, they are still not trying. The Chancellor has answered all three, with tough but fair choices—not easy answers, but a new direction for Britain.

• 28 Oct 2024 · Fiscal Rules · Hansard source

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  It is good to hear about changes to address the big problem with our macroeconomic framework—the bias against new investment spending. May I draw the Chief Secretary’s attention to the other problem with the system, which acts as an incentive for Ministers not to manage well the assets that they already hold? I refer him to the 2017 sale of £3.5 billion-worth of student loans for just £1.7 billion. Will he reassure the House that the changes that he is making will ensure that we get value for money for the existing financial assets that we hold?

• 23 Oct 2024 · Independent Water Commission · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and his announcement of this important review. To have Sir Jon Cunliffe, a long-term public servant, running it is very welcome indeed. Will my right hon. Friend say a bit more about how the close working between the Welsh Government and the UK Government will work, because that will be important in determining how this announcement affects my constituents?

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I praise the speech by the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), who powerfully made the case for change that the Bill will deliver. I should also start by thanking all hon. Members for their indulgence, because it is just possible that another maiden speech is not the gap in their lives right now. Even Members on this side of the House have realised that there is one downside to such a big landslide. My immediate predecessor in the seat named Swansea West served his constituency diligently; he campaigned on important issues like air quality. And I feel great affinity for his predecessor, Alan Williams; like me, he was an economist before he was a politician, and he focused on the bread and butter issues of raising living standards. But today, Swansea West is not very west at all. In fact, half of the constituency in the north and east was previously represented by my hon. Friend—and more importantly, formidable friend—the Member for Neath and Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). I shall endeavour to emulate her passion and drive, but not her bold sartorial choices. In her maiden speech, she challenged Dylan Thomas’ famous description of Swansea as an “ugly, lovely town”, rightly noting that today it is “economically exciting, architecturally beautiful” and “culturally…groundbreaking”. As someone new-ish to politics, I am more concerned about another phrase attributed to Thomas, labelling Swansea the “graveyard of ambition”. Fortunately, he never uttered such words, and the ambition of this great city is alive and well, as anyone who has watched the newly established Penlan under-10s team train in driving rain can attest. Perhaps there is an even more deeply held and widely shared ambition in the city, of our council, our business leaders and the myriad community groups that hold our city together—an ambition for a Swansea in which greater prosperity is created and greater prosperity is also shared. I shall play my part in realising that ambition and doing justice to the honour of being elected for this great city—the city in which both my parents started their inspiring careers of service. But it was a person, not a place, that took a punt on me as a young man: the former Member for Edinburgh South West, Alistair Darling—an honourable Friend in here but always a friend to me. As the banks went bust, he taught me that politics is a vocation to be lived up to, not a game to be played, and that the MP’s role is to combine service to a community and also service to a cause. There is no greater community than Swansea and no greater cause than rebuilding the prosperity of it and this United Kingdom. I am very much not the first Jack to lack a local accent. The city has welcomed so many. Early 18th century records show Jewish names beginning to crop up, and today, our mosques are crucial institutions—ones the whole community rallied around when violence and Islamophobia were seen on the UK’s streets this summer. Those fleeing the war in Ukraine have found Swansea a genuine city of sanctuary. And while I may be the first Torsten to represent Swansea—and maybe anywhere—people with suspicious Scandinavian names are nothing new. Legend has it that a certain Viking provided the origin story of Swansea by settling on “Sweyns-ey”—Sweyn’s island. More recently, the 19th century poet, Walter Savage Landor recognised that the frankly overrated bay of Naples has nothing on Swansea bay. Economists like to talk about comparative advantages and, well, this is ours—glittering from the industrial might of Port Talbot to the more genteel Mumbles. Never mind Naples; there is a far more important comparison with Cardiff. It is a contest long settled by the writer Jan Morris, who succinctly concluded that “Swansea is much the nicer”. It is, but it is no utopia. One in five children live in absolute poverty. The famous industrialist, Sir John Morris, founder of Morris Town—today’s Morriston—lies under St Matthew’s church. That building is today the base for Matthew’s House, a wonderful charity doing work that should never be needed, feeding hundreds of the most vulnerable residents in a city were 340 households become homeless every month. Like many places that drove the industrial revolution, Swansea’s past offers much to be proud of, such as the schooners, built to sail around the horn carrying the copper nitrate that made the city rich, and the world’s first passenger train, instigated by an 1804 Act of this Parliament. It was pulled by horses—an experience perhaps not much slower than on today’s still inexplicably unelectrified main line. We celebrate all this and more, but what my constituents are asking today is how we can build a better economic future—that is the question. The typical wage in Swansea is £536 a week, and House of Commons Library research shows that it has not risen by one penny since 2010. That is what economic failure on a colossal scale looks like. And while wages do not rise, insecurity does. A constituent recently opened her door to me, distraught at having seen her weekly hours cut from 15 to three overnight. None of us could live with that uncertainty, and no one should. If mainstream politics cannot provide the very basics—decent homes, stable jobs and rising wages—many will turn away, from voting or to populists who seek to exploit these problems, not to solve them. Defeating populism also means rejecting fatalism, because we know that progress can be delivered; the minimum wage has proved it, and the employment Bill to be published tomorrow will do so again. Investment can be prioritised, potholes can be filled, and homes can be built. Who owns the best view in Swansea? Not the owner of a mansion but the residents of Townhill, an estate for working people, built between the wars on the precious land in the heights above the city centre. Today we debate what are inexplicably delayed basic standards for the millions of renters squeezed out of both home ownership and social housing. The Bill bans landlords, in Wales or England, from discriminating against tenants who receive benefits or have children. Swansea has many of the materials to build this shared prosperity. I will not list them all, but they include our great universities, a future and not just a past for Port Talbot, and the new opportunities to be seized from a tidal lagoon. Service to a community and to a cause, to Swansea and to shared prosperity: to my constituents, I promise to give my all to that task. Finally, to hon. Members here I bring perhaps even more welcome news: that is one fewer maiden speech to go.

• 7 Oct 2024 · Child Poverty Taskforce · Hansard source

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  13. What steps she is taking to progress the work of the child poverty taskforce.

• 7 Oct 2024 · Child Poverty Taskforce · Hansard source

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  I welcome the establishment of the child poverty taskforce. How will the taskforce ensure that lessons, including on the role of housing costs in driving up relative poverty and the necessity of growth to drive down absolute poverty, will be learnt from previous attempts to drive down child poverty in Wales and across the UK?