News Beat
Chris McDonald MP: ‘My joy at miner pension injustice Budget decision’
It is a time for family and I remember my grandfathers, proud miners, and my grandmothers, who worked long hours to support them and their family. Like so many working class people in our region, I grew up in a colliery village, steeped in the history, traditions and values of hard work, pride and respect.
Coal mining shaped our communities and gave opportunity, but it took a severe toll too in the poor health that our friends and neighbors are living with today. That’s why it has meant so much to me that this Labour government has finally ended the injustice over mineworkers’ pensions.
Last year we returned the investment reserve of the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme to its 100,000 members and this year we have done the same for the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme (BCSSS). For too long, miners and their families were denied the fair pensions they deserve – a scandal that has impoverished communities in the North East and in coalfield areas across the country.
At the Budget on Wednesday, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed that there will be a 41% increase in the annual pensions of 40,000 former mineworkers across the UK. That’s an average increase of £100 per week for the more than four thousand members of the BCSSS in our area. This scheme covers many mineworkers and almost all the women who were employed by British Coal.
As Industry Minister, with responsibility for mineworkers pensions, I know this increase will put cash back in the pockets of thousands of former mineworkers up and down the country and put money back in our communities too. This is their money, earned from their labours and now it is going to where it rightly belongs.
Labour has always been, and will always be, on the side of hard working people. The people from communities like ours, who built Britain, but who have been sorely let down in the past.
Alongside acknowledging the debt of gratitude we all have to the mineworkers, shipbuilders, steelworkers and those in the chemicals and manufacturing industries, on which our prosperity rests, we also have a duty to revitalise our towns and villages across the North East and ensure it is our region that powers the nation once again.
The green energy revolution will bring up to 20,000 jobs in the North East by 2030. Good, well paid, high skilled jobs which will revitalise our industrial heartlands, bringing new opportunities to communities let down by years of upheaval and underinvestment.
Some of these projects are already underway, such as the East Coast Cluster carbon capture project, the single biggest industrial investment Teesside has ever seen brought to our region bythis government and new modular nuclear reactors in Hartlepool, offering well paid industry jobs for young people from our area.
We have a big opportunity to seize this moment to reindustrialise our communities and reindustrialise the country. Putting pride back into work and back into Britain, creating good jobs that offer stability and security for families, jobs that mean young people have the choice to remain in their own area and money goes back into our local shops and businesses.
This Labour government has already made significant progress on our path to clean energy and winning new industry investment. This is our chance to renew our communities, return to homegrown, secure power, offer more opportunities to our young people and to help create a cleaner and more prosperous future for our children, grandchildren and generations to come.
