HC Deb 19 January 1971 vol 809 cc1025-36

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. More.]

6.40 a.m.

Mr. Airey Neave (Abingdon)

I am glad to be able to raise this subject, even at this very early hour of the morning. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence has to be here now, because I know that, like some others, he has an engagement at 9 o'clock. I am also sorry that my hon. Friend has to defend the deplorable regulation to which I shall refer so far as it concerns members of the Armed Forces who marry after their retirement. It is said that this is covered by the whole of the public sector pensions, and this is true, but there is a substantial difference, to which I shall refer, between Armed Forces pensions and public sector pensions.

I do not think that the matter has been referred to very often in the House. So far as I know, the last time was when my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army asked a Question in 1964, and he then received a similar answer to what we have had in the past, that this is the same throughout the public sector.

As my hon. Friend knows, under the current regulations the widow of a member of the Armed Forces who married her husband after his retirement or is not eligible for a Forces Family Ordinary Pension, and a number of arguments have been put forward for this situation, especi- ally by the Treasury—I do not blame my hon. Friend for this—which does not appear to understand the fundamental difference between the Armed Forces scheme and those in the public sector. I do not know that the Treasury really wishes to understand. There is not a large number of people involved, and there is a definite difference between the two to which I wish my hon. Friend to reply when I have dealt with it.

I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Mr. Money) wishes to contribute to the debate, so I propose to sit down fairly soon to allow him to speak for a few moments.

In most Western European countries the regulations are civilised and humane for the widows of ex-Servicemen who marry after retirement, and I cannot understand why that cannot be done in this country. In Austria a pension is paid to the widow if the husband has had five years service and the second marriage has lasted for more than three years. In Belgium a pension is paid where the husband has had 10 years service and the marriage after retirement has lasted for more than one year. In France it is paid if the marriage after retirement from the Services has lasted for more than three years and there are children, or six years if there are no children. In Greece—and we have heard a good deal about the Greek Army in another context—there are no special conditions whatsoever. In Italy, West Germany and Finland they have different regulations, but all allow a widow a pension if she marries a Serviceman after his retirement. Why is it that ours is the only country in Western Europe which seems unable to devise reasonable regulations for this purpose? The husband's length of service in some of the cases which I shall mention in a moment is far longer than the minimum requirements in other countries.

There is no question but that there is a good deal of bureaucratic insensitivity about this, because the comparable situation between Civil Service pensions and Armed Forces pensions has been widely misunderstood and I want to quote some examples of what really happens where those who have served their country best in war are totally ignored by the Treasury in the sense that their widows get no pension at all.

One example which I have been authorised to quote by name is the widow of Captain Warburton-Lee who led the second destroyer flotilla at Narvik in 1940 and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. This lady is still alive. In 1943 she married again. This time her husband was a man who retired from the Army after losing a leg in the First World War. She has neither a Service pension nor a war widow's pension. She is excluded on the basis that I have mentioned of marriage after retirement. Her income precludes the restoration of her first war widow's pension, because there is a means test and she has too big an income for that. Hers is not a case of hardship, but it is a question of principle, and not a matter of which any Administration should be proud.

I know of another V.C.'s widow who is destitute, and has been helped by charities. Her husband won a V.C. before the First World War, and then the M.C. and retired in 1925. He married the lady concerned in 1926 and he died two years later. She received no pension at all. How can any Administration defend that position? It is a deplorable situation. My hon. Friend may feel that he must take the Treasury point of view, but I ask him whether, after the debate, he would be prepared to receive a deputation from hon. Members on both sides of the House—they have written to me about this—including one quite senior Member opposite.

In the third case the widow of a Royal Marine married another Royal Marine after his retirement. She married two Royal Marines. The total service of her two husbands is 57 years. She is not eligible for a pension. That cannot be right. In my constituency two cases occurred which gave rise to this debate. The first concerned a widow of a man killed in 1940. She married a man with 36 years' service, three weeks after his retirement. She was not aware of these regulations. She is not entitled to a pension. The other case was a more recent one, where the widow concerned is in very difficult circumstances.

The Treasury argument is that this creates a new entitlement, and that one can refer to the position in the Civil Service. But there are essential differences between the Armed Forces and the Civil Service. First, members of the Armed Forces generally retire considerably younger than do members of the Civil Service. Further, since the reign of Queen Anne, the Armed Forces scheme has been paying widows' pensions as part of the conditions of service. Therefore, a member of the Armed Forces, by his service, "buys" his pension. He "earns" his pension by his service.

I have no time to deal with the ramifications of this situation at the moment. I merely ask my hon. Friend what reason can justify the Treasury's taking this attitude when there are clearly differences between the two types of pension. There is, however, no difference in the service given by a man who marries one day before he retires from the Armed Forces and a man who marries one day after, but the widow of one qualifies for a widow's pension and the widow of the other does not. That cannot be right. It is impossible to defend this situation very much longer.

I hope that my hon. Friend will approach the Secretary of State to discuss this matter with the Treasury before he receives the deputation, that he will conclude that these regulations should be abolished and that a pension should be paid to widows under conditions similar to those that obtain in overseas territories, especially in the European countries that I have mentioned. The first condition would be that the husband should not have been over 65 when he married, the second that he had completed at least 20 years' service and the third that the marriage had lasted two years.

The Officers' Pension Society has supplied me with a considerable amount of statistics and this information. It is not known exactly how many widows or persons who are still alive are affected by this regulation, including those of all ranks, but it cannot be a large number, so that the question of cost cannot be important. It is not only a question of the regulation to which I am referring but the wretched attitude of the Treasury towards those who have served this country so well.

6.50 a.m.

Mr. Ernle Money (Ipswich)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for enabling me to intervene in the debate. I wish, immediately, to declare my interest in that I shall be citing a case which I know particularly well, though it is typical of several cases to which my attention has been drawn by my constituents.

The case I cite is that of my mother, who married my father in 1923, he having retired the year previously from regular service in the Brigade of Gurkhas, which he had joined in 1898. He retired having been invalided out of the service as a result of illness, which he contracted in the East African Campaign and the Third Afghan War. He was a lieutenant-colonel at the time, but had been an acting brigadier during the East African Campaign. Although they had been married for 47 years when he died early last year, my mother, who is now in her early 70s, receives no pension at all in respect of my father's service.

I fully support the plea made by my hon. Friend both on her behalf and on behalf of the small group of mostly elderly widows involved. I also utterly support the contention that this would not create a precedent and would be an extremely worth-while act of justice, mainly to widows of a group of Servicemen who served their country for a considerable time with some distinction.

6.52 a.m.

Mr. David James (Dorset, North)

I rise merely to associate myself with what has been said on this subject because I have received an enormous postbag on this issue from my constituents. There cannot have been many occasions when so many hon. Members have been in their places at nearly seven o'clock in the morning to be present for a debate of this nature. This shows the amount of interest there is in the matter.

6.53 a.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. Peter Kirk)

My hon. Friends have referred to the number of hon. Members who have remained behind to listen to this debate. I agree that this is a sign of the importance of the subject, an importance which I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon (Mr. Neave) I appreciate as much as he does.

No Government spokesman is put in an easy position on an occasion like this, though I know that my hon. Friend is not expecting me this morning to announce any major change in policy. However, I wish to meet him at once on one point. If he cares to bring a deputation to see me, or perhaps to see me in conjunction with a Minister of another Department—I say that for reasons which I will outline shortly—I shall be only too glad to see him.

I will begin by explaining the present position, because it is important to realise what is behind it. Despite what my hon. Friend maintained about there being a difference in policy, it is a general principle across the public service as a whole that women who marry after their husbands have refired are not subsequently entitled to a widow's pension.

We are here talking about what one might call the Service pension rather than the industrial pension. The industrial pension, which in the case of the Services would be the war widow's pension, is administered by the Secretary of State for Social Services and requires no minimum length of service and continues for the war widow as long as she continues to live. Pensions under occupational schemes within the Government service have always been subject to this particular restriction.

My hon. Friend referred to the reign of Queen Anne. I have not traced the matter as far back as that, but the Royal Warrant of 1818 referred to the widows of officers who die while on half pay being precluded from pension unless their marriage took place before the officer was reduced or placed on half pay.

As I said, that is a principle which has obtained for a very long time, and it was repeated in the 1907 Royal Warrant which stipulated that a pension would not be granted where marriage took place after retirement except where the retirement took place before the date of the Warrant, was due to wounds or illness caused by military service and satisfied certain other conditions. This regulation was incorporated in the new Forces Family Pension Scheme of 1953, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) will no doubt remind me if I do not remind her first, applies to all ranks, whereas before only officers and warrant officers were included for pension.

I start from the no doubt very unsympathetic point of view, but that from which any Minister must start, that this is a principle which goes back as long as widows' pensions go back. The argument advanced for changing it in the case of the Armed Services is that they are entirely different from any other category of public servants. As one who has been privileged to serve not only in the Armed Services but politically with two of them, I am only too proud to acknowledge that this is true. Most of the Armed Forces' conditions of service are specially tailored to the particular and unusual requirements and circumstances of Service life.

But occupational pensions for the Armed Forces, as opposed to war widows' pensions to which I referred earlier, must follow the same principles as govern public service occupational pensions generally, varying only in the same sort of way that pension conditions for policemen are different from those of teachers. The rule throughout the public service is that a widow is debarred from receiving a pension if the marriage took place after retirement.

It is true that a civil servant who is unmarried on retirement receives a refund of his own contributions to the widows' pension scheme back to the date when his wife pre-deceased him. This covers the point that one cannot pass on any entitlement to a service pension to anybody else. This emphasises that there cannot be entitlement to a widow's pension for anyone he thereafter marries. The service scheme is non-contributory and therefore there is nothing to refund, any more than the notional Treasury contribution is refunded in the case of the civil servant.

I do not think that one can argue the proposition that because Servicemen do not contribute to retired pay and pensions they are in a different position from the rest of the public sector. My hon. Friend referred to the idea that the Serviceman buys his pension benefits with service as opposed to those who contribute cash. As for the public service, the qualifications for retirement pension and widows' pension and the rates at which they are paid are established by length of service, and after the initial qualification the rates are related broadly to length of service. Whether the scheme is contributory or non-contributory has no bearing on these conditions; nor is it of significance in the case of a contributory scheme whether such contributions are a deduction from salary or from a man's terminal benefits.

There is, of course, a certain administrative simplicity in having a noncontributory scheme. And yet to emphasise the irrelevance of this issue in regard to rights arising from one method or the other, we have in the Civil Service a non-contributory retirement pension and a contributory widows' pension scheme, though the amount of this pension is fixed as one-third of the entitlement to the retirement pension. A civil servant who married after retirement below the age of 70 has an opportunity to sacrifice part of his pension to "buy" an actuarily-calculated pension for his widow. A service officer in a similar position can under present rules commute part of his retired pay to buy his wife an annuity after his death. There is a close parallel there between the two operations.

Another point stressed by my hon. Friend was that service people generally retire younger than civil servants. That is true to some extent of the general Civil Service, but there are other categories of public servants, for instance policemen, who retire on pension quite often at an even earlier age, and who would therefore be more likely to marry after retirement but whose widows would not have any title to an occupational pension. There is a similar situation in the case of a civil servant who retires voluntarily at the age of 50. In such cases the principle is even more strongly applied. His own pension is frozen and is not payable until he reaches the age of 60, yet if he marries after retirement, say, at 50, though still not receiving a pension, his widow would not get a pension from the Civil Service unless he allocated part of his own pension to her. The same rule applies in the case of civil servants compulsorily retired, except that they get their pension from the date of retirement.

I have said enough to show that this is not a matter limited to the Armed Services. That is the reason why if my hon. Friend wishes to bring a deputation to see me I shall be delighted, but I shall be happier if the matter is dealt with across the board rather than limited to the Armed Forces as a whole. The principle is general, and the remedy, if there is to be a remedy, can only be one applied across the board. Whether or not there is to be a remedy it is not for me to say. I am merely trying to explain the position.

My hon. Friend urged me to look outside this country. He himself has done so, and he gave certain European examples. It may seem curious, coming from someone with my beliefs and background, if I urge my hon. Friend to look at the Commonwealth rather than at Europe. He will find that this problem is not easily resolved.

Dr. Alan Glyn (Windsor)

My hon. Friend was asked exactly how many people are affected by this unfortunate situation.

Mr. Kirk

I was coming to that question, but I will answer it now. I do not know, and I do not think that anyone else does.

There are in Australia and New Zealand no Service pensions to widows who married after their husbands' retirement. New Zealand once allowed such pensions but abolished them in 1949. A woman who marries a Canadian Service man after his retirement or discharge may be awarded a widow's pension if the marriage took place before the husband's 60th birthday and lasted at least a year, but the pension may be reduced, for reasons which I find difficult to follow, if there is an age difference of 20 years or more between husband and wife. My information does not say which must be older.

We cannot make very profitable comparisons with other countries—

Mr. Neave

I have suggested three conditions which I believe to be reasonable. Why cannot they be adopted?

Mr. Kirk

I am not in a position to say that tonight. The point I am trying to elucidate is that there is a general principle here and that the Government cannot consider the Armed Forces in isolation from the rest of the public services.

Dame Irene Ward (Tynemouth)

I thought that we were a modernising Government. It is no good talking about Queen Anne. We want to talk about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II and to modernise ourselves.

Mr. Kirk

I agree with my hon. Friend. It was my hon. Friend the Member for Abingdon who mentioned Queen Anne.

Dame Irene Ward

My hon. Friend mentioned Queen Anne.

Mr. Kirk

Only because my hon. Friend did. I mentioned the pay warrant of 1818, which is the first one of which we have a record.

There is not much that we can gain by looking at the example of other countries. The essential thing is that if we consider this scheme at all we must consider it across the whole field. It is on that basis that I shall be prepared, with, I hope, one of my colleagues, to discuss the matter with my hon. Friend—

Dame Irene Ward

And a lot of us.

Mr. Kirk

Certainly—as many as my hon. Friend cares to bring along. I shall be delighted if my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth comes along, too.—[An HON. MEMBER: "What about hon. Members opposite?"] There was an hon. Gentleman sitting on the benches opposite a few moments ago. I understand from my hon. Friend that he has support from the other side of the House as well.

I have stated the general principle that pension or retired pay must be related to the circumstances and conditions at the time of retirement and cannot be subject to obligations undertaken thereafter. The pension entitlement is restricted to those for whom the Service had some responsibility at the time of retirement.

It should also be remembered that the widow who was married after her husband's retirement will not normally have shared the exigencies and responsibilities of Service life. There are, of course, cases of Service widows—my hon. Friend mentioned one—who re-marry after their husband's death and thereby lose their earlier pension. As he pointed out, they can have the pension restored after their second widowhood, if they have one, but on a means test basis. If my hon. Friend wishes to discuss this with me when he brings the deputation, I shall certainly be prepared to discuss it. But I can, I am afraid, hold out no hope of considering this matter purely on an Armed Services basis. It is a matter which stretches across the whole of the public service and it would be unfair to the whole of the public service if we were to single out the Armed Forces in this way.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at five minutes past Seven o'clock a.m.