The Government has been forced to admit that nearly a quarter of post war baby boomers could be facing poverty in their retirement years. The European Union defines poverty for an individual as your income being less than 60per cent of the national average and in the recently revealed figures it shows that 24 per cent of those over 65 fall into this category.
The rest of Europe breaks down in comparison as 16per cent of pensioners in France and Italy are in a similar situation and in Cyprus, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece the pensioners are in a far worse position.
Our view
The United Kingdom state pension went up by just 2.7per cent in the last year, and the average gas bill went up by 38 per cent! We believe this Government and any future Government has a real headache financially that it can only solve by solutions such as pushing the state pension age to 68. As Joanne Roberts, co-owner of states: “When I started work at 16, I paid my National Insurance Contributions in good faith and 20 years of payments later, they have now changed my state pension age from 60 to 65 and now it is likely to be 68. Using today’s state pension figures, that is a financial loss of £40,000 for me in 8 years unpaid pensions that I will never receive”. This Government needs to explore the many areas that it just wastes money. For example, how can a single parent or somebody who has lost employment then have their mortgage interest paid for years? Guess who then keeps the equity profit in the house with no requirement to repay the interest? Social planners need to wake up to the fact that there are too many takers and not enough givers. We wonder, why is it that an incredible 10% of the indigenous British population, that is over 5 million people, now live overseas?