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.

I'm a pensioner, I worked all my adult life. I took maternity leave with both my kids. As did most of my contemporaries.

You get NI credits if you are;

On UC
Get child benefit
Register for child benefit but don’t take the money (SAHM with family income over threshold)

So, you can not work a day in your life and get a full state pension.

If you lived overseas, had a British passport, and returned here as an elderly person, you may not get a state pension, but you are entitled to housing benefit and pension credit and more.

Instead of taking pensions off people who have paid in for 35+ years, they should look at those who have not contributed first.

And no grants for university just student debt ( I retire in a few years btw)

One thing we may see in the future i a return to multi generational households.
We are already seeing the start of it as more people are not moving out of their parents home until much later than they used to.

I can see a possibility that it will become very common to have 2 or 3 generations in the same house.

i think what confused the issue here is that people were told that NI was towards pension and health - really it’s just an extra tax rather than be upfront about it like many other country’s and charge basic tax at 37% etc - and to be honest many pensioners of today ( mainly women) have often ( not always) paid suprisingly little into the system at all - I’m not bashing women ( I’m 64 myself) and I know the reasons but the fact is a great many only get pension at all due to the state paying their stamp for very many years. Same goes for a lot of the constantly unemployed/underemployed- I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that if you haven’t paid in at least 75% of your 35 years contributions yourself through work , ( with some exceptions like caring for severely disabled children) then an element of means testing needs to come in at pension age to be entitled to the full rate.

The government needs to reduce welfare and stop borrowing to pay for it

You need to target pensioners if you want to reduce welfare.

Targeting pensioners is not fair especially when a lot of those pensioners have worked hard all their lives and paid their NI / taxes

Maybe we should get bingo cards for these threads!

🥱

@Crikeyalmighty agree

They also just need to scrap NI and roll it
into income tax.

There are lots of WFH jobs now, or they should be encouraged, or incentivised for people who cannot go into the work place for whatever reason.

The barriers to work are not what they once were.

If you receive benefits, you should do some work for them. There are places crying out for volunteers, why can’t they gain work experience doing this?

People who thinks it’s ok to target pensioners now forget that they may well live long enough to be that pensioner who eventually loses everything.

And many people who think it’s ok to target disabled and chronically ill people forget that may well become chronically ill and/or disabled themselves. To become that person who looses everything because they aren’t fit to work anymore.
Just one accident away. One illness away that will strip them from what they thought was a given. And yes that includes MH

Spending on benefit is stable as a % of the GPD. There is no huge increase, unfair spending etc… even less so when compare to other EU countries. We’re at the bottom of the pile on how much we spend to support the most vulnerable in our society.

If you want to have a go at benefits scroungers, look at the 3~5% richest people in the U.K.. Look at the companies who don’t pay taxes. Tax evasion (including the so called legal ones). Look at Rees Mogg at the likes.

And maybe we should get bingo cards for you seeing as you like to cut and paste select bits of a post to repost. 🥱

Gosh my mum worked all her life from 16 to 64 with only a couple of years maternity leave. It can’t be fair that they get the same amount .

Totally agree - but, again, one of the reasons it would be politically unpopular is that it would be a massive tax rise for people who work past state retirement age, who currently don't pay NI and so have a significantly bigger take-home than a younger person doing the same job. NI is also a regressive tax, so allows governments to look like we have a much more progressive tax system than we actually do by just citing income tax.

Good for you. My pension mother didn’t work for 15 years whilst raising children, and my pensioner mil has never worked. My father and FIL retired at 50 and 55 respectively, living off independant means but not paying tax for the last decade plus of working life.

I don’t think you understand how bingo cards work 😆

It always surprises me how nasty some of the pension age people are towards the younger generations. Calling them spoiled and lazy, complaining about the maternity leave and "free" childcare the younger generations enjoy. Meanwhile young people are starting their working life with massive student debt, no job prospects and a housing crisis. Childcare is nearly unaffordable, so no surprise people are choosing not to have children.

There is about to be a massive demographic crisis, younger people will be desperately needed. To pay into the pyramid scheme and to provide physical care. My DC live abroad, I will counsel them not to return to the UK until attitudes towards younger people improve.

Totally agree - but, again, one of the reasons it would be politically unpopular is that it would be a massive tax rise for people who work past state retirement age, who currently don't pay NI and so have a significantly bigger take-home than a younger person doing the same job.

Oh, it definitely won’t be popular but it’s the right thing to do.

Right. So nothing personally then? It's all been things that you ar taking credit for, but were instigated by others. There are very many pensioners who voted for parties that didn't take power, and if you were of voting age when student loans came in, you are every bit as responsible for that as people older than you (based on your logic, anyway). Brexit was not just a pensioner phenomenon, either. Many were Leavers.

Yes, house price inflation has given a lot of older people theoretical money, but as long as they live in the houses they aren't spending it, and it will very often go to their children when they die, so it's the next generation who benefits from that, not the older people who bought the houses.

So basically, you have done (or not done) much the same as the current generations of pensioners, then? No surprise there. Most of us aren't in a position to alter the life chances of people other than our own children in any sort of meaningful way. You may resent the fact that you had to work an extra seven years (as did many of the younger generation of pensioners, incidentally), but it was not Joe Public who brought the changes in - it was government, who were there whether you, I or other individuals voted for them or not. It may be easier to blame others en masse, whilst making special claims for yourself, but it doesn't really stack up, does it?

This argument doesn’t wash with me.

I’m paying into a private pension. They don’t squirrel my money away in some locked safe ready for me to draw down. They invest it, and use their pot to pay today’s pensioners. The “contributory” state pension should be no different.

The issue here is that our governments are completely incompetent. Do you think Norway or Singapore are telling their citizens that they can’t have their pensions, or did those governments set up Sovereign Wealth Funds to invest, grow and protect the money.

The difference is that those 2 countries aren’t governed by people who are rich, thick, and couldn’t make it in the real world so chose politics.

But but but….. people need to be back in the office you know!
Look at all those lazy people that use it as way to do as little as possible. I mean some even out the washing on during office hours!
And what are we going to do with our offices?
And what about the High Street if peopke don’t come and buy their lunch/grab a take away coffee etc….

So yay. Tell that to the government and companies who are do relunctant they’ve massively walked back on that.
disabled people can’t cintrol that. Work isn’t there. The number of positions that are FULLY remote is very low - and those that exist are a left over from covid.
The market p/pool of remote jobs simply doesn’t exist

@CuteOrangeElephant there is also a tendency to overlook that child benefit didn’t use to be means tested, my parents got it. MIRAS which my parents also benefited from, etc.

The problem is that there are so many demands on public funds, and no one wants to pay more tax (and they resent the amount they currently pay), so it is not as easy as that.

You could say the same between someone who has worked MW all their life vs a very high earner.
The amount they have paid for ‘pension’ will be vastly different.

Is that unfair too?

My dad died before he could take a state pension he paid for. Did I inherit that? Of course not, because it’s not how it works. My FIL has been claiming his for 30 years. Did he reach the maximum of what he had paid in and so they stopped it? Of course not!
The idea that all this is about benefit fraud is out of the Daily Mail playbook of blaming an unseen group. It’s not true, and would not solve all the problems

I will be livid if it's means tested by the time I retire.
I don't earn loads, never have, but I have paid into a private pension since my 20s.
It's not much, I'm hoping for a very modest retirement.
Why should someone that never worked have the same as me? (Disability and carers aside) I could have spunked my money on holidays instead of saving what little I had.