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.