Leader: Pensioners made to pay – yet again
The economic going is getting tough and the heat is being turned up on that constituency of pensioners who are being portrayed as living in comfortable and lucrative retirement.
The economic going is getting tough and the heat is being turned up on that constituency of pensioners who are being portrayed as living in comfortable and lucrative retirement.
An influential Tory MP who is said to be part of David Cameron’s inner circle has been laying the ground by calling for an end to universal benefits for the elderly.
It would mean no free bus passes for the “better off” and that other benefits would be means tested.
So there we have the deal. Successive governments have encouraged people in work to save for their retirement and to build up pensions pots.
They have also had their arms twisted in an attempt to make them work deeper into old age, so that they continue paying taxes.
And the reward for this hard work, pre-planning, endeavour, and contributing to the state through paying taxes will be to be punished and robbed of state help. In contrast, those who have done nothing whatsoever to prepare for retirement will be supported.
It smacks of picking on an easy and vulnerable target and then imposing divide-and-rule tactics. There are surely other ways that the
Government can save money other than by mugging pensioners who have worked hard all their lives and made valuable contributions to society.
It is quite willing to fork out benefits to young people and those from foreign shores who have paid little or nothing into the system.
We are hearing more and more of these so-called well-off pensioners.
It may well be that this mood music is being orchestrated within Mr Cameron’s circle to influence public opinion.
But to take away the rights of old folk would be a bitter betrayal.
Yes, these are hard times. But leave the pensioners alone.
Comments for: "Leader: Pensioners made to pay – yet again"
Mike
What do you expect? It's the elderly who use buses and the young who pay for them.
Last time I took the 890 to Wolverhampton there were 5 people out of 15 who actually paid to be on the bus, which by the way has become increasingly expensive.
We've got an ageing population and we have to make cuts, remember that while not retiring at 60 might be a blow to some, my generation probably won't even get to retire by 70.
Soggy Sue
Yes, well Mike, does your generation start work at 14? If you work it out you will probably find that your generation will work for 50 years, the same as the current pensioners have. The only difference is that the older folk fought in a war and also did National Service.
Not many people want to retire at 60, or for that matter could afford to.
Maybe the allowances and benefits paid to the young of today ought to be 'loans' to be repaid when they are better off. At least the pensioners have contributed to the system. I don't begrudge them a free bus ride or a decent retirement (if they can afford to live on the State pension, that is).
Bobby
What the Government never mentions is that these little extra benefits are given because British pensioners have one of the worst old age pensions in Europe !
If we received a decent living pension we wouldnt need any extras.
After all we've only paid into the system for 45 years and now we see the money being given away left right and centre to all the world !
Give us a decent living pesion.
jeffb
My aunt when she was alive lived in amsterdam and her pension from the state was almost 2X that of british pensioners, +free travel and care.
How many MP:'s have to exist on state pension? not many could maintain their extravegant lifestyle on an old age pension. typical of governments tax as much as you can to others but leave us alone to 'manipulate our expenses'.
harry saddington
once more they want to clobber the pensioners because they think we cant fight back.
wait till voting time comes around again then see who has the power.
during my working life i was encouraged by politicians to join a pension scheme and also to save for my retirement,this i did and i am still paying tax and the only benefits i get are my bus pass and winter fuel allowance.
from next year our tax threshold will be frozen which means the amount of tax we pay will increase year on year.
leave us alone and concentrate on the tax evaders.
harry.
jeffb
good point look out Cameron and co the pensioners are uniting
Expat
Firstly we need a definition of wealthy .In the last budget Senior Citizens earning between £8105 and £24000 lost the most by reduction of allowances and those poor folk earning over £28790 lost nothing at all so it seems that to this government wealth is inverted and those earning less than about£30k pa will be the only ones clobbered.
Secondly,not much money will be recovered under the present system by means testing prescriptions under which someone for example with about a dozen permanent prescriptions and paying nothing would merely have to switch to a season ticket costing less than £9 per month so they will not save much from folk like me who , since we pick up a little bit from a private pension will almost certainly be regarded as wealthy.
Thirdly, none of the folk that I know with a relatively comfortable lifestyle and a motor car would be seen dead on public transport, which is generally regarded as dirty and dangerous, unless absolutely necessary or driving to a city centre ,so there is not much to be saved there either.
The simple fact is that these right wing think tank people are merely rabble rousing and will ensure that whatever happens they will not be a penny worse off and possibly even better off because of a reduction in Income Tax.
You have also incidentally omitted to mention the right wing proposal to merge Income Tax and NIC which means that all age groups will have a Basic Income Tax Rate probably in excess of 30% and which really would hurt all pensioners with income above the breadline .
Ell
My mother has just started collecting her pension, she works full time.
As a result her personal tax allowance has been eroded down to just £587 per annum and I have checked with IR, it is correct
We have worked out that by taking her pension but not paying national insurance anymore she is actually £12.50 per week worse off!
She is being taxed on her entire pension and earnings!
ken
typical tory policies they never change! come the election they will be out back where they belong in the wilderness, my father always said "the only good tory is a dead one".
Roger
I read this proposal and it referred to after the next election. Since the Tories and LibDem’s are now both unelectable I don't think there is any need to panic. However we pensioners do need to clarify to any campaigner who calls just how much we have been affected by this governments multi point attack and the inflation on the key items we need, food fuel etc. As to the proposal to means test prescription charges I consider this close to homicide in seriousness. Many of our pensioners already don't eat properly and don't heat their homes properly so I think they will avoid prescriptions if they have to pay, or fear that they will have to pay. 6-7 Pounds an item is a small fortune for pensioners with their health care needs. They are losing all of their services and tax allowances and CPI instead of RPI on their pensions. The net effect of all this is a fall in living standards of over 20%. But we will not forget at the polling booths the Tories will go in 2015 and will not be back for a generation. The Posh Boys perceptions were wrong, their policies are wrong; their tax relief for the rich immoral and their numerous "U turns" demonstrate their muddled thinking to the benefit of everyone except pensioners. This is the worst government I have survived in my long life and I don’t think I am alone in that view.
What these idiots have to remember is that our generation worked continuously all our working lives. We have paid for our pensions time and time again and we paid for the social contract we had with governments and planned our retirements to match, as we were always told to do so. These thieves are stealing our retirement.
JOHN JONES
Roger. Well put. There is only one party that will look after the English pensioners.
Peter
Good to see you've finally come round to the Labour point of view...
JOHN JONES
Peter. Please do not use foul language on this page"""""
Peter
Ah, I see...
You're talking about voting for a one-issue party that managed to get a few council seats and promptly lost all of them when people realised what poor quality representatives they'd voted in.
Your party of choice is unelectable - but if you wish to continue wasting your vote on a bunch of bigots that's your prerogative...
Marshall
Sad part is that it is our own fault. We worked hard all our lives, except for a few weeks terrifying redundancy. Still paid the full 44 years tax and NI and did not even have kids.
What we did do was fork out a fortune to educate this lot, then even more to keep them in the style to which they helped themselves. Just think, we taught the greedy bankers how to count. We failed terribly to protect our borders and have sent soldiers to die in Afghanistan whilst they queue up at Calais to come here!
Now what can we do - voting does not work.
TC
Society is made up of old people and young people. Old people didn’t start off old; they were once young: working, having families, and paying taxes. These young people gradually age until they are old and no longer able to work. When this happens, it is important for them to be fully replaced by a new generation of young people. These young people will in turn work, have families, and pay taxes, which go in part to supporting the elderly population which can no longer support itself.
However, this setup only works if the young are more or less equal in number to the elderly. If the number of workers becomes too few to support the number of elderly, then the whole system faces the danger of a catastrophic collapse.
Each couple needs to have 2.1 children (one to replace mother, one to replace father, and the .1 average to replace the children that never live to become tax payers) - You may have contributed all your life, however by not having kids you have not contributed as fully to the economy as you could have, and have therefore unwittingly been part of the cause of the very measures that need to be taken to cut off funds to an aging population because the youngsters can't sustain your needs and theirs too.
expat
I omitted to mention in my previous letter that, apparently , right wing thinking is that if NIC is , as I mentioned , added to Income Tax for all taxpayers there will then be no need for a Higher rate of Income Tax [ currently 45% ]. No prize for guessing who is going to be 15p in the pound better off , certainly not many readers let alone OAPs !
liverbird
Hear hear, older people have accumulated wealth over a lifetime of hard graft. When I read they want to take away bus passes from the old it makes my blood boil. The Coalition are all millionaires so they dont know what real people need. These people built this country from nothing and if they are rich it is self made and alot are very poor and need that travel pass.
Grey
I notice there is rightly condemnation in the comments section about pensioners being forced to pay more and get less but I wonder what they would be saying if the headline said benefit claimants or public sector workers all of whom have been hit already and probably to a greater degree than the pensioners will be.
Steve D
When the puplic sector workers are having to live on a state pension, then will see who is changing what tune....
Steve D
If this stupid government would stop sending millions and millions of our monies abroad then we would be able to look after our own and I do mean our OWN!
We send millions to India and they can afford a space program (what's that all about) ? We are still sending money to Argentina, they are so grateful they are trying to steal land from us. My God when is this government going to wake up?
Peter
Where is the leader writer's evidence that we are 'giving money to those from foreign shores'?
It's simply not true. Entitlement to anything but a very low subsistence level of benefit simply doesn't exist until people have paid in for at least a couple of years. It's simply demonising foreigners without any reason to.
The fact is that this government is attacking just about everyone except their friends the rich. If you're working, you're penalised. If you're old and retired - you're penalised. If you're out of work, you're penalised.
The idle rich however, who have the gall to talk about an 'entitlement culture' amonget the poor, still think themselves entitled to make money out of ever-cheapening labour, via short-term and 'zero hours' contracts, and also entitled to pay proportionately less tax than the rest of us, usually by shipping their profits offshore via one scam or another.
Forget about scrapping foreign aid, forget about blaming foreigners, or unemployed youth - simply tax the rich properly and you could sort out our eceonomic problems overnight.
helen
Peter-
Well said. And as for the Government being supposedly "quite willing to fork out benefits to young people." Really? It has already cut entitlement to housing benefit for young people and slashed financial support to those in further and higher education (stopping EMA and bringing in changes to tuition fees predicted to result in the average graduate starting out in life with a £30,000 debt). It is also proposing to decimate remaining entitlement to benefits to the under 25s if it gets into power for a second term. Thank God it won't get that second term. Young people leaving education are increasingly referred to as the 'lost generation' with no jobs and few prospects, abandoned by a government that couldn't care less. What a way to treat our future.
In support of pensioners the article attacks the Government for "picking on an easy and vulnerable target and then imposing divide-and-rule tactics". How depressing that it then goes on to do exactly the same thing with regards to young people and immigrants.
shirley
Pensioners like myself(nearly 80 paid into the system for more than 42yrs.We took nothing out family allowances were paid only for a second child.Sick pay for a week was 2 days (if you had enough stamps on your card)and a doctors certicate)Maternity benefif 13 wks.7 weeks before the birth and 6 weeks after.These benefits only if you paid a full stamp.Well they are welcome to my bus pass because as soon as I had it they took the bus away.So instead of trying to manage on my £107 per week I will claim my extra benefit of £35 per week plus council tax benefit.Icurrently pay £22 per week coucil tax.After 20 yrs as a pensioner I could have my first holiday.
Amy
Reading these comments and noticing not one comment has been made about those pensioners who haven't worked "all their lives" - yet they get exactly the same benefits. What about those, who have never paid for anything in their lives?
Roger
Ironically those who never worked and never saved are un-effected. In fact they get more to top up the state pension to a living level. The logic is of course that if you have nothing you can not be robbed. The very rich are in the same situation they got tax cuts at the higher rate and don't use bus passes. So they are less affected. When it comes to prescription charges they may be affected, but of course their ability to buy the monthly prescription charge is significantly better. It's a classic case of the squeezed middle. Those who have occupational pensions and those who saved have enough for a reasonable retirement, but there is just enough fat to steal and no organised union opposition. We will survive to vote though so the forward projected thefts will never happen. I hope the other lot are not learning about how easy a target we are because I don't think we can last through ten years of this.
Kattherine de gama
Cutting universal benefits of any of a kind is a slippery slope. So many elderly people are too proud to claim anything which is means tested.
Young people have not been served well by this government (unemployment, soon homelessness, tuition fees). It's a mistake to pit the generations against each other. We're all in this together but some more than others.
twiggo
Amy, do you mean the sort of people unfortunate enough to have been born with the sort of disability that doesn't enable them to "contribute" by finding paid employment?? the sort of people who have worked with dedication to the voluntary sector but not been paid so not paid tax? like those who have had children with chronic health conditions necessitating them to dedicate their lives to working unpaid to care for their kids? the sort of people who have spent their lives caring for elderly relatives, again unpaid?
Are these the kind of people that deserve nothing from the state? You must have led a charmed life to have the gall to say what you are saying.
Amy
Well if you would actually care to read my comment rather than fly off the handle and get the wrong end of the stick - did I once mention anyone with a disability etc - I think you know exactly what I mean. I am sick of people scrounging benefit, never working an honest day in their lives, yet get benefits and privileges such as free council houses, rent free etc. This applies to the young and to the old. I am tired of people milking the system and it does happen all around us and nothing is being done.
I have worked full time since the age of twenty. Rather than making accusations about my life, which you know nothing about, I suggest you read comments calmly rather than reply in haste and get incorrect.
Full time Carer
Amy-
Perhaps you should write a bit more clearly if you don't want to be misunderstood. You started off by commenting on 'those pensioners who haven’t worked “all their lives”'. The groups Twiggo talks about are all in that catagory. Later adding comments about 'benefits scroungers' doesn't really clear things up, it's just another way of having a go at people without knowing anything about them. I think it is you and not Twiggo who is making accusations about lives you know nothing about.
jasper bergman
It's the idle, tax-avoiding rich, not the benefit-scrounging poor that are bleeding this country dry.
Yes there is a very, very small minority of people who don't want to work, rely on benefits for their whole lives etc etc but they cost the country virtually nothing compared to the millionaires with their creative accountants who hide their money and assets offshore and make the most of loopholes so they don't have to pay their share.
And surely it is worth a few "scroungers" slipping through the net so that those honest people who fall on hard times can have the benefits they need. If you get rid of all the scroungers you have a system that also denies many honest, working people the extra help they need to pay their rent, buy their kids school uniforms etc.
And any one of us can fall on hard times, even you Amy.
Watchdog
Jasper, I put it to you that you have never had to put the system to the test. I know an eastern european chap who was granted asylum in the 90s. He lives in a housing association flat worth a quarter of a million pounds and he doesn't work because he plays the "difficulties in communicating in English" card. Actually, there isn't much wrong with his ability to speak, read and write English, he simply doesn't want to work because he feels that he has no need to. You try losing your job or injuring yourself though and see just how helpful and generous the "system" is then. Not at all, is the answer.
jasper bergman
Whether or not your "foreign scrounger" even exists, my point was that a system that allows a few people to take advantage is better than one that penalizes those most in need.
I know someone who, within a short space of time of finishing chemotherapy for cancer and still very poorly, was told that if she didn't "actively seek work" she would lose all her benefits.......these are the new rules that this Government is bringing in to try and root out the "scroungers".
Stuart
As a "onetime" dedicated and true blue tory, I needed Camerons (and Clegg's) cabal of Eton toffs to bring me to my senses. Within days of getting power, I parted company with the tories and since then they have only compounded an utterly devastating attack on everything I once held dear. Fairness, justice, compassion and concern for the under dog have been thrown away (yes, at one time the old tories did believe in these things) and the true face of this atrocious, obscene party can be seen in all it's vicious imagery.
Before the election, they professed to have the answer to everything, they have wrecked everything that they have touched and shown that they have the answer to nothing, except power for the sake of power. I just hope that pensioners do unite and vote against the tories and lib dems as I am partly influenced in my views by the picture of my sister in law, on her death bed in a care home with Alzheimers having had to sell the family home to pay £800 per week whilst in the next room was an elderly lady who had been placed there by the Local Authority (Wiltshire CC) and was required to pay nothing because she did not have a house to sell having lived in a council house. Where is the justice in that, and they (the tories) are quite prepared to continue this outrage. Come on pensioners, make it cost them dear at the next election.
Kat de Gama
Social care should be free for everyone. Beverage must be turning in his grave.
derby and joan
i agree with wealthy pensioners losing their benefits in say 20 years time, and income tax may now be reduced to 35p for those earning more than 100,000k as they will not receive any benefits when they retire.
the whole tax system needs to be rejigged so that benefits are only given to those who need them
edwin turner
it will cost more to means test it than it is worth--and as for the bus passes--if they are scrapped the money will just be wasted elsewere and the busses will mostly--still run empty free tv licence--if the bbc updated and chased defaulters the fee could be half even with the new technology being
inputted--i know someone who must owe£100,000
at todays rate
Barbera
I'm a firm believer in that the strong should look after the weak with one cavaet, that the weak shoud have done their level best to provide for themselves and not seen society as one big piggy bank.
My father worked a full week well into his 80's, his sister has not worked since WW2, yes you read it right 1945, living at dads family home.She is not a sickly person and has all her marbles.
Come reaching the age of 60, because she hadn't paid anything into the system she went onto supplementary benefit or something like that and is able to claim almost twice the amount the state pension that my father is entitled to, where is the justice in that?
Watchdog
I've had several jobs, but not a day's unemployment since I left school. I'm a manual worker, not a Lord, but I guarantee that by the time I retire, I shall not be allowed to enjoy the 2 small occupational pensions I've earned during my working life. On the contrary, I fully expect to be worse off than folk who have never worked or contributed. The message is: It really doesn't pay to be a good, honest, hard working citizen.
JOHN JONES
Watchdog, As a pensioner aged 70. Your last sentence is the best that has been on here in years, just a few words that sums the whole system up.
Woody
The benefits system is totally upside down, back to front, a**e about face.
We should be looking after the people who have worked all their life and paid into the system as hard working citizens.
We should be looking after the disabled and chronically ill people who have paid into the system during their working life, but, due to no fault of their own are no longer unable too.
We should not be giving benefits to those who have never worked in their life, who have more children just to claim even more benefits. Neither should we be giving benefits to those who come into our country who again, have not paid into the system for at least 5-10 years, but think because they are part of the EU etc they are entitled.
To stop a problem you need to address the underlying issues, before moving forward with solutions. The Government needs to stop going for the soft option i.e. pensioners and/or the genuine sick and get to the real root of the problem by growing some cahoonas!