How do you live on a pension?

16/04/2008

So Nigel Waterson, the Shadow Pensions Minister (MT March) and his front bench colleagues will be tabling an amendment requiring the Government to name a date for the restoration of the link between average earnings and the state pension. Will Mr. Waterson now remind us which Government broke the link in the first place? 

 

D. Healey, Bedfordshire

I seem to recall that it was Mr Waterson’s party under Margaret Thatcher who abolished the link between earnings and the state pensions in the 1980s - thereby saving the Conservative Government millions at the expense of far more deserving pensioners. Now Mr Waterson thinks that pensions should not be a political football. What rank hypocrisy! 

 

P. Walshaw, Sheffield

I have just received my tax coding for next financial year and have found according to HM Revenue and Customs, (whatever happened to the Inland Revenue?) that I am £333 over my meagre personal allowance.  Incredibly, this will be taxed at 20%!

How the hell are we supposed to live on less than £5,500 a year?

 

I worked hard all my life, brought up two kids whilst working most of the time, paid my taxes and NI and became disabled whilst in employment. What Gordon Brown and his coterie forget is that I still have one thing that hopefully no government will take away - a vote - as do thousands of pensioners of my age or older. I shall not be voting for his party in the next election. They have abandoned socialism, me and the pensioners of this country. 

 

Jean Akam (by email)

 

 

Since 1980 an MP’s basic salary has risen by 416.4% from £11,750 pa to £60,675 pa, whereas the basic State Pension for a single person has increased by only 221.5% from £27.15 pw to £87.30 pw!

 

If the full basic State Pension for a single person had risen by what MPs awarded themselves, then today it would be worth £140.20 per week instead of the miserable £87.30 that it is. It would have taken the basic State Pension slightly above the level of the Pension Credit which is £119.05 and saved the country millions of pounds in means-testing administration and niggardly bureaucracy.

 

Colin P Hadley, Chairman, 
Devon Pensioners’ Action Forum