News story

1st March 2003

Steve Webb Leads MPs to Downing Street in Pensions Protest

Northavon MP Steve Webb last week presented a mass petition to 10 Downing Street to call for urgent action on the pensions crisis affecting women. He was joined in the presentation by more than a dozen other Lib Dem MPs and MEPs who had collected signatures for the petition. The MP has been contacted by many local women who have been horrified to find, late in their working life, that they had little or no entitlement to a state retirement pension. In response, the MP has taken up the issue in Parliament, has helped to form a nationwide campaign network of affected women, and before Christmas presented a short documentary on Channel 4
television which generated hundreds of letters from all around Britain.

The petition, which was handed in at Downing Street last week, notes the poor pension position of too many women and urges the Government to launch an independent investigation into the way the pension system has let women down over the decades. This request was reinforced by Steve Webb in a private meeting with Secretary of State for Pensions, Andrew Smith, last month.

Commenting, Steve Webb said:

“The crisis in pensions is always in the news, and many people are quite understandably concerned that their company and private pensions will underperform. But many women depend very heavily on the state pension and for far too many of these, their state pension entitlement is hardly worth having. The purpose of our campaign is to secure an independent investigation into the way that married women in particular have lost out through state pension rules, and to consider whether there is any way in
which this injustice could be put right”.

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