HC Deb 15 July 1968 vol 768 cc1023-4
28. Mr. Biggs-Davison

asked the Minister of Social Security whether she will consider giving some National Insurance benefit to deserted wives in her Social Security Review.

Mrs. Hart

Under the National Insurance Scheme, a deserted wife retains her right to retirement pension and widow's benefit on her husband's insurance, and the husband, when sick or unemployed, can receive dependency benefit for her provided he contributes to her support. Apart from this, State provision for deserted wives is through the supplementary benefit scheme. To have National Insurance benefit for this purpose would involve considerable difficulties.

Mr. Biggs-Davison

Does not the right hon. Lady, on reflection, think that desertion ought to be recognised as an insurance risk? What would be the approximate numbers and cost involved in carrying out this proposal?

Mrs. Hart

I must confess to the hon. Member that the same thought has passed through my mind. I will not deny it. It is not so much the cost, it is the sheer difficulty of this. For example, how would one define desertion? What account would one take of the support a wife was continuing to get from her husband? These are the kinds of difficulties which have led me so far to suppose that we are probably still right to regard the supplementary benefit scheme as being the best and most flexible method of helping deserted wives.

Lord Balniel

Yes, but would the right hon. Lady agree that the whole position of women in the social security system— deserted wives, widows, disabled housewives—should be given the very highest priority in the reconstruction of the scheme?

Mrs. Hart

Yes, indeed I do. I have always taken the view, as one of my colleagues, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) said, that social security is to a considerable extent about women, but I think that it does not necessarily follow that one must throw overboard the whole of the existing scheme. I think it means we have to look very closely at the provisions we have rather than replace them with something new.

Mr. Molloy

Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance that at least she will move very much more quickly than did the party opposite when it was in power? Would she examine the possibility of having legislation introduced which would make it easier to help wives to get maintenance from their husbands who make no effort to give it?

Mrs. Hart

There has been a recent report from a Committee appointed by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary on points connected with this. It is, of course, a question in which we are concerned simultaneously with the courts and with our social security system. There are a great many points here worth a great consideration—that I will certainly agree—but I am not yet convinced that we would be right, as we are asked in the Question to do, to replace the supplementary benefit scheme by insurance benefits.