Is ending the triple lock to fund a care service fair....

[mids2019]

To me this is actually not a hugely left wing proposal as middle classes with occupational and private pensions will not notice the reduced increases in state pension significantly.

However poorer pensioners with little other pension provision may be impacted a lot to essentially fund a care service that will be disprotioanrly help the middle classes as their life expectancy is greater.

Is it fair that our poorest pensioners get less to support a care service which would mean a millionaire pensioner would not nèed to sell their assets to access it?

It wasn't students who decided on the aim of 50% to University, and it wasn't students who made employers decide that lots of jobs/careers/professions became graduate entry where previously they were open to school leavers. Young people are having to go to University because the other options have been pulled from under them in lots of cases. Apprenticeship schemes are heavily over-subscribed and are as rare as hen's teeth compared with the number of university places. Don't blame the young, blame employers (including in fact especially the public sector) and politicians!

Acknowledging times were better doesn't mean that times were perfect.

It is also true that today's youth didn't vote for the governments that made degrees almost mandatory for many entry level jobs. This all began in the 1990s and those that are pensioners now will have voted for this in large numbers. Young people today are stuck in this reality though where degrees are expected and very expensive for the individual.

Today's pensioners enjoyed unprecedented levels of economic stability and prosperity over their lifetimes. They have avoided all major wars and seen improvements in spending power that have stagnated in recent decades. They enjoyed lower house prices in real terms and even when interest rates were high, income to debt ratios remained lower so were more affordable overall.

I am not blaming the young people. Some have been really shafted by the go to university push.
But don't rewrite history either. There was a cap on university places in the past so very few could go. The majority of people were never going to get good enough grades to get a university place. So yes it was free, but for far fewer people. Thoe people who went did benefit and that was mainly middle class bright people.

When I was young the focus was on trying to get working class kids to stay on at school beyond 16, as most left and started full time work, or were unemployed as there was record youth unemployment.

The free university education was available to everyone.

It wasn’t. There were 156k undergraduate places available in 1974, the year I’d have graduated if I’d gone at 18. There were 650k births in the year I was born so no way was a university education available to everyone with roughly one place for every five 18 year olds.

Now they have mandated that young people stay in education longer and have encouraged university this masks the true unemployment rate for young people today which would at least be comparable to the 1970s or 1980s if so many weren't removed from the statistics as they are still in education.

Having seen his interview on tv this morning

he is suggesting a double lock rather than a triple lock and make old age care for dementia the same free at source care as you get for cancer

Did you "pump out" your children though? Like we all apparently do?

Well FFS as you so charmingly put it, I graduated at 22 having worked for a year before going to university. I was one of the 10% who went to university then, and less than half of that 10% were women. Between then and retiring at 67 I worked for 35 years and stayed at home to bring up my own children for 12 years. There was no subsidised childcare ,very little childcare, and 6 weeks paid maternity leave for each child. For the whole of our working lives my husband has earned at least 4x average wage and therefore paid a lot of tax. I would suggest that between us we have made a fairly sizable contribution.
Our children never had a day of publicly funded education, and we have always paid privately for dentists and frequently for medical care. I think we certainly have paid our way.
If I'm lucky then statistically I'll have 16 years of retirement.

Thank-you to the many posters who have pointed out this is essentially home visits rather than a home.

Pointless waste of time.
Its certainly not going to remove the bed blockers from the NHS.

I know at least 3 people who have ended up in care and nursing homes after falls, and the NHS deciding they aren't fit enough to return home.
2 had dementia and should have received 24hr care long long before it was actually granted.

People with dementia are being left in situations you wouldn't leave a child in.

That makes it sound a bit easier than I recall it being!

I just have lost all appetite to be asked to contribute any more to anything.
We don't have much quality of life despite having highly responsible jobs and I work full time with chronic illness and I am somewhat done with half the country just wanting everything paid for for them.

It is a complete mystery to me why a lot of posters are so, so spiteful and nasty about old people.
I think it comes from a genuine conviction that they are the only generation to ever feel the pinch when bringing up children together with a misplaced entitlement to the same standard of living that their parents have had a life time to build up. They also seem to think they are the only generation to have ever paid the pensions of retired people from their taxes.
The fact that they will be old themselves seems to pass them by. Calls for the state pension to be means tested or abolished is like turkeys voting for Christmas.
It's very unedifying.
And all the bitterness towards the new care plans 'benefitting older people again' - open your eyes! It's younger generations who will benefit the most from this, as their inheritance will be safer than it it now. But they are blinded by spite.

None of your children went to university? That's govt subsidised

And it will benefit younger generations because there will be fewer demands from their elderly parents to help them.

Many of my generation have spent a lot of time practically supporting elderly parents whilst working and looking after kids. If you don't have to do that, your life will be easier.

I think a lot of it is people are jealous. They see older people who appear comfortable and forget the years they had struggling to make ends meet bringing up kids and putting their house together.

A lot who are retired now will have started work at 15 or 16, now its not unusual for young people to be 21 before looking for a full time job.

Thats 5 or 6 years being supported that the current pensioners didn't have.

Exactly. I am sick to death of posters cherrypicking the best parts of being a pensioner - free university education for their children, rising house values - yet brushing aside the struggles they have had over the years - negative equity, spiralling interest rates, no subsidised childcare etc.
As I said above, today's 30-somethings seem utterly convinced they are the only generation to struggle when their children are small, while the older (and wiser) among us know that these are always the most expensive years of your life.

I think it's that the generations above us have profited enormously from insane upswings in house prices. And we are paying the cost of it in either huge mortgages or a totally lack of ability to even dream of buying a house.
And now the market has flattened the people with big mortgages aren't making those same juicy profits.
I remember a time when many people were making more than their annual salaries in house price growth . And that was the people who got a grant to go to uni, whereas this generation are loaded with student debt
Or course the generations that are paying for this resent it . Particularly when they now see the NhS crumbling and a state pension being pushed back to later and later in life.

I positioned between the split, I gained a little from house price growth and I was able to pay off my student loan by 30. But I can also see why the next generation are very angry that they will face an entire life burdened by unimaginable debt or precarity

My parents bought their house on twice my dad's salary. My mum could be a SAHM and they could send 3 of us us to private school.

I now do essentially the same level public sector job (a complex stressful one) my dad did and the house is worth about 15 times my salary. A combination of huge house price growth and the erosion of public sector salaries.

And they had no student debt, in fact they both had grants despite growing up in affluent MC families. They are honest people and they know they are hugely privileged compared to future generations

Yes there is an element of social housing existed which helped keep house prices under control.

But many trades people were denied mortgages because they were hourly paid.

They only got to buy because of the council house sales.
But also remember lots of council houses that were built in the 50s and 60s were cheaply built, shoehorn in as many people as possible. Lots of those horrible estates and multi stories are now being pulled down.

There were also the young couples who lived with family while they waited for a council property. And then lived in the horrible eatates while they waited on the slightly nicer houses that they then bought

Yes, before my parents bought a house they relocated across the country and immediately were able to get a flat in a really lovely social housing block. No waiting list.

That enabled them to save to buy their home despite living on one income with two small children

If your parents could afford a mortgage and three sets of private school fees on your dad's salary, it must have been a very high salary. Private school has ALWAYS been expensive. To suggest this was normal is just silly.

Nonsense, there were loads of pretty ordinary people at our private schools - the children of nurses etc

You miss my point. I know this. I sent my son to private school on a standard salary.
But to suggest it was commonplace to pay three sets of private school fees and all other household expenses from one salary is ridiculous. I am 59 and I know some of my friends' mums went to work just to pay private school fees

Fortunate for them to be in a nice social housing block.

My parents stayed in a multi, my mum would bleach the lift if she was expecting visitors. There was some disgusting people lived in that block.

Yep
Its going to be an oh shit moment when they realise that this wont penalise Boomers at all but it will be one step closer to zero state pension for them 😂
Turkeys/ Christmas indeed