South Yorkshire MP tells parliament that ‘trust in police still impacted’ 40 years after miners’ strike

Speaking during a debate, Stephanie Peacock MP, who represents Barnsley East, said that the strike had ‘ripped towns like Barnsley apart’, and called for the reform of miners’ pensions.

Ms Peacock told the House of Commons on May 9 that ‘time is running out’ to remedy the pension scheme, in which the government receives half of any surplus cash from the scheme, in return for a guarantee that pensions would increase.

The government confirmed it had received £4.8bn from the scheme over the last 30 years.

Ms Peacock said that constituents in Barnsley ‘deserve to know the truth’ and are ‘still waiting for justice for what happened to the at Orgreave’.

The pivotal events at Orgreave in 1984 ‘changed how we are policed as a society’ Ms Peacock said, and that ‘trust in the police is still impacted in areas such as mine, even today’.

“The average miner has a pension of just £84 per week, and widows are on a lot less. Ministers have admitted to me that the “take it or leave it” deal when the pits were privatised was done without any actuarial advice.

“In 2019, there were 160,000 men in that scheme, but today that number has sadly fallen to just under 125,000. Time is running out. We can and should do better for our miners, whether that be on miners’ health, on miners’ pensions or for mining areas, as they face the economic legacy of pit closures to this day.”