Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:17 pm on 20 March 2019.
I'm going to declare an interest in this, and I'm also going to inform Darren Millar, who has put this amendment down, that it's wholly and absolutely inaccurate, because I know that I didn't have a letter. Don't tell me I had a letter and I didn't read it: I didn't have a letter, I couldn't read it, and that's the same for those people up there. We had the initial warnings when the Labour Government said they were going to change things. The accelerator letters, I don't know where they went, but there must be a postbox full of them somewhere, and it must be in the ether, because it never landed in people's letterboxes. So, you need to remove this and you need to face some facts, and you need to be honest about it.
So, I went out there—. I've spoken many times on this debate that we've had today, and I've met many, many people. I met somebody outside today who was telling me that it's physically impossible for her to do her job at the age that she's expected to do it. There's almost an understanding that men very often do physically demanding work, but it doesn't somehow translate and get read across that women do physically demanding work. Cleaning, for example, is physically demanding work. Nursing and caring is physically demanding work. You would need to try it. I suggest you try it, and then think about the fact that you will be expected to do it at the age of 60.
This takes us back to Victorian times. When we very first had to have pensions, it was at 70. The age was 70, and there were caveats within it that you didn't do this, or you didn't do that, because if you weren't of good character you couldn't have a pension. We're going backwards at a rate that has never been seen before.