HALF A CENTURY ON

IF YOU live outside South Devon, England, you probably won't have seen my Torbay Times Pensioners Platform column for January-February 2016 (see photo below), so here's the second of two articles published in that column...

 

FIFTY years ago I was living in my home town of London and fast approaching my twentieth birthday. In common with many of my fellow Post War Baby Boomers, at every opportunity, I was listening to the so-called pirate radio stations Radio London and Radio Caroline. The fantastic Summer of Sixty-Six was just a few months away when Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones; Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks; Paperback Writer by The Beatles; God Only Knows by The Beach Boys and, of course, England’s World Cup win would make it such a memorable summer for music and sport.

However, there were storm clouds looming. The BBC and the government were scheming to outlaw pirate radio stations, and they succeeded in doing so the following year. But we Baby Boomers were – and still are – a fair minded lot, and we demanded a music station to cater for the popular music tastes of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. And so BBC Radio 2 was born, to compliment the younger sounds of Radio 1.

Nearly half a century later, it’s a completely different tune. We are now the older generations and the BBC has chipped away at our share of the music radio cake to leave us with little more than left-over crumbs. Now that can’t be right – or fair – can it? After all, there are more than ten million UK seniors, and most of us pay for our BBC licence. If that doesn’t represent a huge, largely untapped and deserving audience, I don’t know what does!

PENSIONERS IN POVERTY

IF YOU live outside South Devon, England, you probably won't have seen my Torbay Times Pensioners Platform column for January~February 2016, so here's the lead article....

ACCORDING to a recent study by the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) more than one in ten UK pensioners receiving only the State Pension lives in poverty. This finding was placed into even sharper focus when Caroline Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK said, “This report helps to explain why 1.6 million older people are living in poverty here and constantly struggle to make ends meets.”

Tom McPhail of the Bristol based Hargeaves Lansdown financial services company went even further by saying, “This analysis makes embarrassing reading for the politicians who have been responsible for the UK’s pensions over the past 25 years.”

Overall, the OECD report shows that Britain lags a long way behind in the State Pensions league. Of the 34 nations polled, we in the UK came third from bottom in the rankings, which were calculated against each nation’s average wage. Only pensioners in Mexico and Chile get a worse deal than us. I kid you not. We were only beaten into last place by Mexico and Chile!

In fact, those of us in Britain who rely solely on the State Pension get a meagre 38% of the average UK wage, while our neighbours in Germany and France receive half and more than two thirds respectively. And it doesn’t end there because pensioners in The Netherlands are paid 96% of that nation’s average take-home pay, and in Spain it’s 89.5%, while Turkey’s OAPs get a whopping 106% of Turkey’s national average wage. As for the remainder of the 34 developed or emerging nations polled by the OECD, their pensioners receive an average of 63% of each nation’s average wage as their state pension. That’s a quarter more than we get in the UK … twenty-five per cent!

Despite our near global poor relation status, we UK pensioners continue to be targeted by some of our own politicians, media-types and uninformed talking heads who think we’re too well-off. You know the type: firstly they refer to the State Pension as a benefit, which it’s not. It’s an entitlement. Then they demand we’re stripped of our bus passes, winter fuel allowance and free TV licences.

True, some of us have been able to pay into private pensions over the years, so we’re able to top-up our State Pension income to a more meaningful level. But more than one-and-a-half-million others haven’t been so fortunate. Instead, they’ve spent their working lives in menial, badly paid jobs that gave them just enough to survive on, and no chance whatsoever of saving for their retirement. Now, they’re living in poverty while, last year alone, David Cameron insisted on throwing £12 billion in tax payer’s money into the black hole of overseas aid: often to corrupt and underserving regimes.

The result is 1.6 million UK pensioners struggle to survive, while people in far-off lands benefit from the very tax contributions those same UK pensioners may have made during their working lives. It beggars belief that our government continues to pour eye-watering amounts of money into aiding the (alleged) disadvantaged elsewhere in the world, while here at home we have so much poverty. Surely those 1.6 million struggling UK pensioners deserve a much better deal? Perhaps it’s time, then, for Mr Cameron to add another issue to his demands for EU changes. How about State Pension parity across all European states at around fifty to sixty per cent of each nation’s average wage? That would help to lift one in ten UK pensioners out of the poverty trap.

WHAT ABOUT US?

IF YOU live outside South Devon, England, you probably won't have seen my Torbay Times Pensioners Platform column for October~November 2015, so here it is....

WHILE Prime Minister Cameron throws £100million more at the European refugee crisis, plus a staggering £25million for a new prison in Jamaica, here at home, the plight of millions of UK pensioners is conveniently overlooked. Even the BBC and the news media in general seem to be more pre-occupied, these days, with Europe’s porous borders and the welfare of the thousands of migrants heading our way, than with the difficulties being faced on a daily basis by many British seniors in our own back yard.

Talking of which: tucked away on an inside page of the Daily Mail on Thursday September 10, I spotted a small item headlined “The Pensioners Who Can’t Pay for Essentials”. I hope the Prime Minister and other politicians of all persuasions saw it, because those few column inches made for alarming reading.

According to a recent study carried-out by the insurance giant LV, tight household budgeting has resulted in millions of UK pensioners deciding to “go without”. In fact, nearly five million British retirees are unable to afford to buy items they need, including essentials. The LV report also revealed that one in twenty pensioners can’t even afford to purchase Christmas and birthday gifts for their loved ones. In addition, the study found that forty-two percent of home-owners aged 65 or over admitted “going without” to make ends meet.

Even more worryingly, one third of UK pensioners are forced to survive on an income of less than the minimum wage and, of those, one in twenty-five say they struggle to pay their all-important utility bills. Most telling of all is the revelation in the report that pensioners here in the South West are more likely to “go without” than virtually anywhere else in Britain.

Critics of the LV study might point to the massive eighty-three per cent of Over-65s who own their own properties, and suggest equity release as an option. But, it’s not as easy as that. In fact, hardly a week goes by without reports of vulnerable UK pensioners being persuaded to sell their property to unscrupulous equity release firms, only to find they’ve signed-up to much less than they expected or, worse still, a smaller lump sum and a commitment to move-out within a year. On the face of it, the whole equity release minefield looks to be awash with crooks. However, there are more honest voices to be heard.

For example, John Perks (pictured above), the managing director of Retirement Solutions at LV says, “It’s deeply concerning that so many older people are struggling in retirement, often going without life’s essentials but it doesn’t have to be this way. There are many options available and using untapped housing wealth to supplement other incomes is a route worth considering, as it allows you to free up capital and afford the retirement you want.

“It is unfortunate that misconceptions about the way retirees can use their property to plug an income shortfall persist as, in the right circumstances, equity release can be used to help afford retirees a better, more comfortable standard of living. We at LV would always recommend that someone seeks advice from a specialist before taking out equity release.”

 

That’s all very well, but pensioner poverty exists today in the UK and the powers that be don’t seem to care. Instead, as we approach winter 2015-16, politicians continue to wring their hands over issues beyond our shores, while the media fills our eyes with images of well-clothed, well-fed, energetic and sometimes riotous groups of men, women and children trekking towards what they perceive to be EUtopia (my deliberate spelling error).

Have you noticed, by the way, how the TV cameras tend to seek-out the little ones to tug at our heart and purse strings? We are told all these people are fleeing war-torn Syria, Libya and other areas of Africa and the Middle East. But most of them don’t appear to be suffering from the trauma of war. In fact, many of them have smiles on their faces, not of relief, but of expectation and determination.

That, in turn, poses two questions: just how many of these people are actually war-ravaged, battle-scarred victims? And how many of them are economic migrants hell-bent on hand-outs and a cushy life on benefits in Britain?

Some reading this article may accuse me of racism but, frankly, I don’t care. After all, it’s only a word that has lost its potency through over-use. My response to such accusations is this: is it right that even one UK pensioner (or younger person for that matter) should go hungry or cold – or both – or die of hypothermia or malnutrition here in Britain, while those who haven’t contributed a penny towards our Welfare State receive £millions in hand-outs? Surely humanitarianism should begin here at home, caring for our own, first and foremost?

JUST BIN IT!

IF YOU live outside South Devon, England, you probably won't have seen my Torbay Times Pensioners Platform column for November-December 2015, so here is part two of that column....

Lord Toby Harris Chairman: National Trading Standards

ACCORDING to officers working for National Trading Standards (NTS) many UK pensioners are being ripped-off by scams arriving through their letter boxes in the form of unsolicited mail. Between April 2014 and April this year NTS officers identified nearly 11,000 victims aged, on average, 74 years. Typically, they had been cheated out of more than £1000, but the NTS believes the losses are much higher.

Indeed, NTS figures point to prize draw scams alone costing the UK public £60million, with an estimated 380,000 victims each year. Lord Toby Harris (pictured above), who chairs the NTS, said: “It is not just money they take from innocent people. Many victims feel they have lost their dignity, their self-confidence and their sense of security. We [at NTS] have limited resources and I am all too aware that, in many areas, we may only be skimming the surface of the problem.”

So, don’t become a scam victim. If you receive an item of post through your letter box that you don’t recall asking for, or you’re not expecting. And if it’s telling you about a prize draw or making other offers that look too good to be true, that’s exactly what it is … too good to be true. Just bin it!

TAKING US FOR MUGS?

IF YOU live outside South Devon, England, you probably won't have seen my Torbay Times Pensioners Platform column for November-December 2015, so here it is....

 

 

ONE morning, a few weeks back, as I logged on-line to check my emails, I spotted a pensioner-related article on the BT news feed which made my blood boil. According to the article, the right-wing Taxpayers’ Alliance think tank has called on Prime Minister Cameron’s government to cut pensioner benefits. Sadly there’s nothing new in that kind of demand coming from right, left or centre, but what I then went-on to read plumbed new depths of discrimination against the elderly. In fact, the report contained several quotations that displayed some of the worst examples of ageism I have ever seen in print.

 

For example, Alex Wild, the research director of Taxpayers’ Alliance (pictured above) was quoted as saying that many UK pensioners might “not be around” at the next general election, and apparently he added that other pensioners may forget which government had made the cuts. Mr Wild was further quoted by the BBC as having said that cuts to benefits such as winter fuel payments and free bus passes should be made, “As soon as possible after an election for two reasons. The first [of those reasons] will sound a little bit morbid: some of the people ... won’t be around to vote against you in the next election. So that’s just a practical point, and the other point is they might have forgotten [who made the cuts] by then.”

 courtesy: telegraph.co.uk

Another member of the panel, Dr Liam Fox, the MP for North Somerset (pictured above), was also said to have insisted that any such cuts must be made permanently, in order to help the next generation. He is then reported to have suggested that older people would understand his position on the issue. Oh really Dr Fox? Well, you can count me out for starters, and I dare say a great many of my fellow UK pensioners would say the same.

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there because Dr Fox added, “We have a broken opposition. We have just won a general election and we need now to take the tough decisions we believe are right.”

Then, as if to add injury to insult he said that, in order to fund current pensioner benefits, the State is, “Borrowing from the next generation to spend today”. By all accounts he even tried to justify his viewpoint by comparing this alleged ‘let’s rob Peter to pay Paul’ process to a pyramid selling scheme, adding that such an arrangement is unsustainable and needs to be changed.

“We can’t afford it now, we can’t afford it in the future, why don’t we try to get a longer-term plan put in place so that people can make the adjustments they will need to make for us to be able to get back into balance,” he said.

Firstly, I’m puzzled by Dr Fox’s reference to getting back into balance. In truth, I’ve never been much good at arithmetic, but even I can grasp the fact that, at the end of March this year, the UK’s National Debt stood at £1.56 trillion, and it’s growing by an eye watering £2 billion every week! Bearing that in mind, targeting UK pensioner benefits as a way of helping to reduce our National Debt would, I believe, amount to the saving of a few drops in a huge ocean. Surely a much better place to start would be to scrap the profligate and increasingly discredited Overseas Aid programme that, last year, cost the British taxpayer more than £12 billion?

As for Alex Wild’s suggestion that, by 2020, many of us would have forgotten which political party made cuts to our benefits. Is he trying to take us for mugs? Think again Mr Wild! We may be of advancing years, but most of us would never forget who cynically discriminated against us in such a measly manner.