There was an unexpected interlude of hilarity yesterday in the otherwise dry-as-dust Work and Pensions Questions, which customarily takes the form of a litany of statistics, each of them grim and each of them concealing hundreds of thousands of untold individual miseries.
The senior Conservative, David Heathcoat-Amory, rose to his feet to ask the Secretary of State:
Mr. David Heathcoat-Amory (Wells) (Con): If she will estimate the total pension deficit liability in the public sector.
A look of perplexity, followed by panic, crossed the faces of the five members of the ministerial team. Nobody had the answer. Then Angela Eagle, who glories in the title of Minister for Pensions and the Ageing Society, and who had clearly been given the short straw by Yvette Cooper, rose and approached the dispatch box tentatively, as if it was an elaborately carved, brassbound form of improvised explosive device:
Angela Eagle: We have been told that this question has been transferred to Her Majesty’s Treasury.
Speaker Bercow, however, would have none of it:
Mr. Speaker: Order. Let me say to the hon. Lady that the House was certainly not aware of that. I was not aware of it, the question is on the Order Paper, and I know that she will offer us an answer.
Ms Eagle knew she was stuck with it and had to make the best of a bad job. She paused, drew a deep breath, and ploughed on with her answer:
Angela Eagle: I am happy to offer an answer. The total pension deficit liability in the public sector is, off the top of my head, close to £600-odd billion, but this has to be seen in context. The pension liabilities are calculated over the next 80 years. In that context, it has to be borne in mind that the average size of a public sector pension is £4,000 to £5,000.
Mr. Speaker: So there is time for an update.
David Heathcoat-Amory could hardly contain his amusement:
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: It is obvious that the Government do not have a clue. They cannot even find a Department to answer the question, so let me provide the answer. Outside agencies estimate that the public sector deficit liability is about £1 trillion, which is £1,000 billion. In the pre-Budget report, the Government were going to get that down by only £1 billion, which is one tenth of 1 per cent. Is it not obvious that in this area of policy and many others we need a change of Government to get the answers?
Ms Eagle knew that she had made a chump of herself; there was no saving the situation, so she decided that attack was the only option available to her:
Angela Eagle: The right hon. Gentleman persists in scaremongering about the provision of public sector pensions for millions of low-paid public sector workers. As I have said, the average pension payment is £5,000 a year. Those liabilities are perfectly sustainable and comprise between 1.5 and 2 per cent. of GDP. If the right hon. Gentleman is telling the House that the Opposition do not think that that is sustainable, what he is saying to the electorate in the forthcoming election is that they will take away the public sector pension provision of millions of public sector workers who are out there working hard to keep our public services going in difficult times—and that, Mr. Speaker, is an absolute disgrace.
But she knew she had blown it and that, furthermore, she had been offered up by her four colleagues to take the elegantly-delivered kicking from Mr Heathcoat-Amory.
With a look approaching fury, she turned to her officials sitting in the box behind the Speaker’s chair and mouthed venomously: “That was a complete foul-up”.
At least, I think she said “foul-up”. The “f” was clear enough.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones appeared on the Andrew Marr Show this morning.
