In a country so grossly unequal, nothing is fair. As the government plans to raise the state pension age from 66 to 68 at a much earlier date than previously announced, it looks increasingly unjust to pay out the pension at the same rate and at the same age for everyone, regardless of wildly differing circumstances.
A universal state retirement age means wealthy people will receive payments for many years more than the poor. The tyranny of averages conceals vast social class differences within Britain. Men in Richmond-on-Thames will, on average, live healthily until the age of 71, while for men in Blackpool, a healthy life expectancy is just 53 years, meaning they will wait in bad health, unable to work for 13 years, before qualifying for their pension at 66. In Blackpool’s Bloomfield ward, reports LancsLive, the average life expectancy of men is just 67 years and three months. That means many will never make it to drawing a pension if the government’s plan goes ahead. Prof Sir Michael Marmot, whose groundbreaking research analyses the effect of poverty, deprivation and deadening jobs on health and longevity, tells me: “If 68 becomes the new pension age, 60% of men never reach that age without a disability that prevents them working.”
Age UK says that 3.5 million people aged between 50 and 64 are out of the workforce already. “Many of them [are] in poor health and with few savings by the time they reach state pension age.” Others are caring for loved ones without social care, all while being frail themselves. Some of that missing workforce could be helped back into jobs if they had enough support, but many will never work again, instead being left miserably poor, waiting for pensions.
Inequality in Britain has just been ratcheted up yet another notch, as annual figures from the Office for National Statistics this week show incomes of the bottom fifth falling, (with wages down by 7.5%) and the richest fifth’s rising, yet again (with wages up by 7.8%).
Crude averages often disguise individual hardship, especially when inequality within an age cohort is greater than between cohorts. Rising life expectancy, a feature of my whole lifetime, is now slowing, and diverging further between classes. For poor women, it’s actually falling back. Still, the chancellor uses convenient average increased longevity as a reason to raise the pension age and cut mushrooming pension costs, which take 42% of the social security budget. Soaring numbers of older people will have to be supported by shrinking numbers of the young, as the birthrate of future taxpayers plunges. It is true that for the first time in history, older people are the group least likely to be poor. But this is a useless guide to making policy on pensions when some old people are very poor.
The chancellor tries to have it both ways as the cost of the pension bill is swollen by the Tories’ expensive triple lock, guaranteeing pensions keep rising faster than other benefits, up by 10% this April, an inflation-proofing denied to striking public servants. Is that prudent, just to buy pensioners’ votes? What a perverse view of the future to give a triple lock even to wealthy pensioners who don’t need it, when Marmot points out that struggling families and children have been stripped of support in the last 12 years, amounting to 20% of their income.
Past pension age myself, yet in well-paid work that enhances my life, I am astonished by the un-needed benefits lavished on me. The most valuable item I carry everywhere is my freedom pass, worth thousands each year in free transport. Why am I entitled to a pension before I need it, or free prescriptions and eye tests? Above all, why don’t I pay national insurance? Unlike someone exhausted from a lifetime of back-breaking, mind-numbing toil, I don’t yearn for retirement – I dread it. It makes no sense to treat me the same as others living in hardship, too low-paid to have amassed savings or home ownership, just because we share a date of birth but little else in our life’s circumstances.
If older people are becoming too heavy a financial burden for young taxpayers to bear, start by making those who can afford it contribute more. We own the most property, and we should pay taxes on it. The social care catastrophe, leaving so many frail people dying in neglect or filling a hospital bed reluctantly, needs funding by those who have accumulated assets in our comfortable working lives, not triple-locking the pensions of people such as me with a 10% raise denied to public servants.
This government’s policies spring from their own narrow life experiences, without empathy, understanding or interest in lives less lucky than theirs. Here’s Spectator writer Ross Clark’s take on raising the pension age: “Go the full hog and jack it up to 70 immediately,” he writes. “Under the proposed changes it could mean me having to work – quelle horreur! – a full extra year. Except that I wasn’t planning to retire anyway, at any age – or at least not until I am rendered incapable by age. My inspiration comes from the Rolling Stones, still leaping about on stage in their late 70s, rather than all these librarians and pen-pushers swanning off in their 50s, claiming to be too fagged out to continue any longer.”
It’s time he and his government took a trip to Blackpool, taking with them the work of Michael Marmot.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
