When will people realise that pensioners have paid for their state pension.

[notsafeanymore]

Every time there is a debate about the cost of living pensioners get a bashing.
And some have also paid for a private pension.
It's people who have never worked that should be targeted first.
I'm not on about the disabled. It's people who are benefit cheats and have never worked.

Your number 2
The proposal to tax income from £1 means there’s no lower exempt threshold. So everyone who is earning pays in

Re your highlighted and last comment. Currently a person has a minimum number of hours they have to work to get certain benefits ( that can be shared by a couple ).

It’s currently 16hours so a couple only need to work 8hours each )
My point in my comment was they should be made to work far more hours than that

‘ If you work 16 hours a week in the UK, you are no longer considered unemployed, meaning legacy benefits like Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) generally stop. Instead, you could be entitled to Universal Credit, Working Tax Credit, or Council Tax Reduction depending on your household, income, and circumstances’ Govn.uk

One way to get more tax into the coffers would be to tax everyone, regardless of where the income comes from.
A tax-free allowance as we have now, then any income over and above that is taxed (the same as pensions are ironically).
Universal credit, PIP, pensions, maintenence - they should all be taxed.
There is no legitimate argument why someone earning, for eg. £14k is taxed and someone getting £14k UC isn't.

Another thing that needs to be examined closely is people working part time and getting uc to top up wages.
I am sure there are some legitimate reasons forbthis, but there any many who use this to their advantage as a lifestyle choice.
That needs to stop

Oh did they claim benefits?

Dream on - it’s nowhere near as good as it used to be, and no better than what I got in the corporate world before I retrained.

and you’d be happy with less money to pay your bills with now would you?

This isn't about whether it's good or bad to be a SAHM though. This thread is that financially the NI they have paid won't cover the costs of them drawing their pensions so the current work force are paying for it.

As I understand it the NHS pension is still linked to earnings so you have far more certainty which in my view is valuable so yes, I would pay more for something of real value.

Would you like it a pension pot that could lose thousands (as mine did when Truss was PM?). No one likes to lose money from pay but in uncertain times, I’d definitely prioritise the certainty of the type of pension you have. And when the time comes you won’t have the nightmare (as I see it) of choosing what to do with your nhs pension will you, as happens with most other pensions. Again, I see value in that.

You had the choice at the beginning of your career to go public or private route.

Assuming you didn’t want a nursing job where you have to deal with the public thinking they own you and fewer opportunities to move company for larger pay rises?

Questioning nurse pensions is scraping quite low.

It isn't a competition, your situation is also awful. But nobody wants a pay rise that means taking home less money. Bills don't pay themselves and public sector wage rises don't usually keep pace with inflation as it is. The % contribution should ideally be the same for all grades or keep pace with the wage increases/bandings so nobody finds themselves with reduced take home.

Anybody that wants to work in public sector has always been very welcome to apply but often people at higher levels won't because the pay is not that competitive. I think the pension (which is not as good as it used to be), transparent grade/band structure and having some impact on public service are the main things going for it.

People in private sector should be angrier imo and the lack of union membership means the fight is much trickier. Thinking back to my 20s, any rumblings about pension T&C's were totally irrelevant to me because new starters were not under the same schemes and it is so far in the future.

Oh yes but when I went down my career choices, the pension issue was not a thing for most people.with hindsight, I wish I’d joined the civil service!

I’m not scraping low barrels attacking nurses at all, we are talking about different pension schemes, and to my mind, having some certainty is factual, and valuable. That is not an attack!

Personally I think we also need to look at the idea that child maintanance isn’t counted when assessing UC - I know many don’t agree with me, often because they are benefitting - but I fail to see why the person I know getting £850 a month very regularly for years and still getting her rent paid and an awful lot of top up on around 10 hours a week work doesn’t have it counted as income - she is way better off than many single mums I know working full time with older kids and doesn’t want a full time job , quite understandably - she pays no NI , gets her ‘stamp’ paid for towards pension purposes - obviously if situation changed it should be reassessed and quickly but I’m sure the Tory’s brought it in as a vote bribe combined with ‘can’t be arsed’ when it came to child support agency. My view is don’t count for first year- after that if it’s regular and timely, it gets counted.

Yes I do see what you’re saying. I suppose we can’t all work in the public sector though and yes a fact that private businesses do what they need to stay alive or be profitable and I’ve never worked anywhere with pay bands or automatic or union fought for increases. A colleague in one place I worked was heard to discuss joining a union and another reason was found to get rid. And despite what another poster said, I’m not grudging or attacking NHS workers, I know I couldn’t do it (the medical side)

You know that can happen to anyone, right? It’s not just limited to the NHS. My annual pay rise was 1.5% last year, and if that had put me in the next tax bracket then guess what? I’d have had to suck it up.

Completely agree

We should, like public sector pensions, be able to look at a scale of payments and know exactly what that will equate to when we retire.

We don’t have that privilege and everything could be easily lost in a crash as has happened many times.
There’s no such thing really in the private sector of secure pension planning and this needs to be addressed

That isn't the same at all. Employee NHS pension contributions vary between 5.2% & 12.5% on a sliding scale depending on salary. In theory receiving a pay rise could result in a pay cut because of extra pension contributions but it would be unusual.

www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/member-hub/cost-being-scheme

Ah of course, it’s only NHS workers who have to deal with sliding scale pension contributions, tax brackets, student loans contributions etc. Nobody else has to deal with any of those.

If your 1.5% pay rise had put you in a higher tax bracket you would not have had a cut in take home pay. The sliding scale of NHS pension contributions makes that a potential but unlikely possibility.

It does if it puts you in a new bracket and along with higher taxes the pension contribution also has to increase as part of your agreement

That’s before we get to the issue of professional fees which for some, including myself, mean at a higher pay I had to pay my own which originally was the responsibility of my employer

This is why when some people reach a cliff edge and see they will be worse off seek to reduce their hours

Only on MN can pensioners be criticised for not paying into private or workplace pensions when they were working (even though they were nowhere near as widespread as they are now) at the time as arguing that today's workers can not afford to pay into a pension.
The irony.
I can only assume that the pensioner bashers on here lack the imagination to put themselves into someone else's life and/or are not interested enough and too self-absorbed to want to.

even though they were nowhere near as widespread as they are now

Historically, before 1970, many private pension schemes barred women from joining if they were married or worked part-time. Broad, equal, and guaranteed access for women was not formalized until the implementation of automatic enrolment in October 2012.

No point critiquing something that woman were barred from joining in some cases

Don’t forget that employers also pay NI contributions on top of employee contributions. That’s one of the many complaints against the Labour government.

Exactly. Yet now - even though pensions are widespread and automatic - ir's still apparently OK not to pay in because today's younger workers are uniquely struggling.

It's also worth pointing out that anyone born in the 50s/60s and now taking their pension was born into the welfare state. That offered a safety net in the case of illness, unemployment, homelessness etc. Maybe not enough to live in luxury but enough not to starve. Even if not everyone retired needed to use it,.it was there. It was part of the social contract that existed. The other part of the social contract was that if you paid into the system by supporting the retired generation, you would be supported in turn.

The "there's no such thing as society" mantra from the 80s has gradually eroded this social contract. I agree that pensioners deserve a comfortable retirement. However, the reframing of pensions as "earned" and other aspects of the welfare bill as unearned/scrounging is a rewrite of history designed to set different groups against each other and justify removing the safety net from the young (inc. children) to prop up an increasing welfare bill for the old due to aging population. It's not sustainable and will generate its own backlash against the old (unfairly).

The insults and inferences run both ways.

That was sort of my point?