If we all in this together what cuts have oaps faced?

[3asAbird]

As my title says im struggling to see any.

Winter fuel allowance -stays universil-too expensive to means tesrt
same with free bus passes.

part of their social care is paid so they can leave wealth to their families

They excempt from bedroom subsidy so they allowed to under occupy and biggest group.

Pensions I think went up

This new married couples allowance maybe another additional benefit to them if they large proportion of this group.

Housing-they brought at right time probably paid off mortgage and have lots equity.

They moan about interest rates but they fortunate enough to be able to save.

If social-how many homeless pensioners are there? Are they always band a?

Maybe im being harsh and some pensioners have it hard.

But locally they have several holidays a year, holiday homes, brand new cars.

wondering how exactly we all in this together ad should there be mass turnouts under 60 to vote at next general election.

[CogitoErgoSometimes]

BTW... what hardships have OAPs faced? Let's see. A 70 yo today born in 1943 would have faced rationing in their early years, little access to further education in their teens, a bit of a purple patch in their 20s, rampant inflation and extortionate taxes in their 30s closely followed by high unemployment and lots of spending cuts in their 40s. In their 50s there would have been some big hikes in mortgage rates and more unemployment to contend with. If they still had a job after all that and retired age 65 in 2008 they'd have been buying annuities in the middle of a stock-market crash and credit crunch ....

[3asAbird]

Can I repeat I don't hate pensioners.

I was asking a sensible question and apart from

council cuts which would be regional.

cant see any central cuts made.

I think there was a time when pensioners were low income group.

But we live longer now and those who can retire early have a nice life if they have money.

1 of my nans was poor and still is, my other nan and her sister were quite well off.

There was times in past where

loads jobs
you could bring up family on 1 income.
living costs were not as high.
Housing was affordable and even social housing was availiable.
pensions where employers contributed.

many people I know in 20,s and 30s don't have a work pension.

I read and see lots on tv about they paid their stamp they entitled/

Not many of my grand parents generation worked like parents have to work now.

Free high education.
fe colleges were better then and apprenticeships were real leg ups for my parents generation not dumbed down low paid non jobs they are today used to be called yts when i was in school and sold as great idea for kids leaving at 16.

I know a few people families and friends who from age 16 until 20,s been in low paid part time work as cant find anything else and living at home with parents and have few prospects of promotion of full time hours.

During late 90s I had part time job in nursing home.
The majority of residents were private not many on social care plan.

On occasion I risk getting the over expensive useless bus and its filled with oaps as they go lots day trips whilst see others walking miles to work in the rain.read recently local low income people walking 6 miles to nearest food bank and 3 half miles to job centre.

I have 2 wealthy pensioners next door who like to moan, both run fairly new cars, always having home improvement work done, going shopping, holidays ect yet they use the bus a lot.
Guess least keeps bus companies in business. sensible.

As the governer of bank of England is canadian and they vote as a group like to think they making independent decision they not rising interest rates as they worried as recovery is fragile don't think anyone at government forcing their hand.Maybe im being idealistic on this one.

If they want a sensible argument about cuts then they need to face facts that pensioners are the biggest bill in dwp budget.

That bashing other groups at conference is vote winner for they grey right vote like it would please them to make other groups suffer seems perverse that denying young people opportunities they had.

The people who fought in war getting smaller.
Baby boomers freely admit they had it good david willis wrote a book about it, paxman admits it too.

But have heard the whole young people dont know they born.
When I worked full time after baby no 1 getting judged by elderly people for not being there including my mum mum.

Saw bit on this week janet street porter arguing why they should keep everything.

There are entitled people in every group but seems to be lots in older generation too.

Its morally wrong with all the cuts that it funds jags, heating in holiday home shopping, hair dressers whilst poor pension, people on disabillity,young people, job seekers all expected to get cuts.

Raising kids is expensive and cost living is high.

The average family has lots outgoings that a pensioner would not have.

Maybe this divide and rule pitting one group against another is working.

If we so broke we need to decide what we can afford.
not make soundbites for next election.

[Kinnane]

It's a bit sad that some people think that the State Pension is a 'benefit payment'. State pension which is £100 per week has been paid for by pensioners in their working life. It is not a 'benefit'. Another part to consider is that many pensioners do not receive a full pension. I think you need to work about 40 years to receive a full pension. Their are many sons and daughter who help look after their pensioner parents,

[MistressDeeCee]

Pensioners get more of what they want because they get off their backsides and vote. Of my friends, hardly any bother to vote. Theyre happy to moan about government cuts, tho. Pensioners have worked for years and paid their dues, my attitude is leave them alone.

By the time we reach pension age there'll be more than enough to worry about. But if Id worked all my life and were lucky enough to reach old age and have some comfort, I wouldnt feel anyone has the right to moan about that at all. As ever, government cuts result in working classes turning on each other to see who has what. Better to get up and vote against the government who are engineering chaos and misplaced envy, and encourage everyone else you know to do so too.

[kilmuir]

Op you sound jealous and juvenile.
Younger people expect more from the government. My nan worked hard all her life, no handouts then.
Younger people live beyond their means, are snobby about which jobs. They do and are lazy. And not very well educated.My uncle runs a quarry, says some of the young british are bad workers, unreliable etc. he can rely on Polish workers to put in a full days work. They are less used to hand outs for sitting on their arses.

[youretoastmildred]

Several posters have pointed out that OAPs have to live off pensions, state or otherwise, or whatever else they have accumulated, as they are not able to go out and earn more.

Yes, but there is a blatant inequity in the value of their earnings in their day, and the value of our earnings now. I think they like to think that they are awfully wise and clever to have put something away for a rainy day, back then, but in the here and now, many working people struggle to do so as:

jobs are scarce and insecure. Many people in apparently well paid jobs alternate periods of employment with periods of redundancy and job hunting. Averaged out that really lowers your income and your ability to save
housing relative to incomes are shocking
energy, transport, other unavoidable costs similarly shockingly high relative to income
many two-income families may look well off in a gross sense but factor in childcare, as well as the above, and it disappears (many oaps had SAHPs in the family and don't understand that doubling the workers doesn't double the income)
Many will be paying tuition fees
Many of the lower paid will lose their jobs altogether as they get made into workfare situations

So you aren't comparing like with like when you point out that the OAPs have had their time of earning money, and we are having ours now. It is a time difference that is equivalent to a geographical difference: it is like asking why someone in Mumbai isn't earning the same as someone in London and expecting the person in Mumbai to take the difference on the chin, while imposing the same bills and costs and expenses on them both, and treating them both as members of the same economic community

[Beastofburden]

georgette we may lose our audience here if I get too geeky but you know, valuations of schemes don't rely entirely on new people joining them. An immature scheme can allow a bit for that, but on the whole what you are valuing is the difference between the returns you get on your investments and the likely rise in the value of your liabilities. You future cashflows have to match. The key thing is how much more your investment yield is than the inflation on salaries and pensions. There's lots of ways of working it out, and you have a certain number of years to cover a deficit, but if your valuation shows too big a gap between assets and liabilities, the regulator will insist on contributions going up to cover the difference.

None of that is true of government run schemes, they alone are allowed to be unfunded, as the jargon has it.

Agree entirely that if we made state pension means tested then it would be expensive to maintain the existing standard of living for wealthy pensioners. They would have to become correspondingly poorer. Which is not going to happen- as I said, it's actually going the opposite way.

Ok, everyone else can wake up now, pension geeks have finished

[georgettemagritte]

Cogito they also experienced the longest peacetime boom period in global modern history, globally unprecedented wealth, access to water, free basic and highereducation, health and social care, no compulsory military service or wartime draft, cheap energy as fossil resources were consumed, massive leaps in productivity, living standards, life expectancy, increasing wealth and the financial gains from three unprecedented one-off economic shifts (automation, mass entry of women into the labour force, labour arbitrage through globalisation - all of which will never be repeated. As well as several smaller one-off productivity gains from eg. North Sea oil, privatisation and the biggest asset price bubble in history). They are the first global generation to look forward in mostly good health to what could be thirty or more years of funded retirement. A Western 70-year old is, no kidding, one of what is the luckiest generation ever in global history. (Disclaimer: obviously this does not apply to every individual 70-year-old: I am talking about aggregate cohorts.)

Median real incomes stagnated in the US from the 1970s and in the UK from the 1990s so following generations will never experience their lifetime peak earnings growing in the same way compared to inflation. Automation has slowed massively and the productivity gains from women working and global labour arbitrage can't be repeated; plus we are running up against ecological resources constraints which are non-negotiable, so it's hard to see what could fill in for the generations coming behind.

[PlatinumStart]

My parents spend their WFA heating the pool

They were never wealthy when I was a child - although obviously with a pool I'm not going to try and argue they were hard done by. But they bought a house when I was in primary school for 65k that they later sold for £1 million.

My dad is on a civil service pension that sees him receiving a significant % of his final salary. Life is one permanent holiday for them and whilst I don't begrudge them I certainly think they, and their friends are extraordinarily fortunate.

[SueDoku]

Maybe this divide and rule pitting one group against another is working.

Truer words never were written – the idea of getting the ‘lower orders’ to turn on each other rather than notice what’s going on above them has been used for centuries (most recently in the 1930s) to allow those who are really benefitting to tighten their grip on the reins of wealth creation.

The average family has lots outgoings that a pensioner would not have.

Such as? Everyone eats and drinks, needs warmth and food, needs to use transport to get around (if they are able to), needs clothes and shoes and - if they are lucky - some form of communication (phone, Internet) and entertainment (TV, radio). If someone owns or rents a house, they all need to pay council tax, water rates, insurances and – if they are the owner - need money for maintenance and decorating.

Most pensioners have brought up a family, and so have had the expense of feeding and clothing their children (and yes, it was as difficult then as it is now to pay for school shoes, winter coats etc), finding money for school trips and outings, buying birthday and Christmas presents and attempting to pay for some kind of a holiday (often camping because it was cheap).

All of the above done on (often) one wage – not because it was easy, but because chldcare was so difficult to find – and with interest rates of up to 17%.

Please stop making us sound as though all those years of scrimping and saving were to allow us to live in the lap of luxury, rather than to allow us to have a modicum of dignity and happiness after working bloody hard for half a century.

[Grennie]

It sounds like lots of you know well off pensioners. Perhaps not surprising as those on mumsnet appear to be financially better off than average. I know plenty of poor pensioners. Those living in rented accommodation and living on state pensions.

Those who are in poverty are also far more likely to be chronically ill or disabled. They are also more likely to be carers for others. They get very little help in this role.

Instead they get people who come from better off backgrounds bashing them. I suspect those bashing are from better off backgrounds and will inherit houses, etc in their old age.

Bash the rich if you want. But to focus on elderly people because the elderly people you know are well off, is pretty disgusting.

[ivykaty44]

council cuts which would be regional.

cant see any central cuts made.

councils get their budgets from central government along with council tax - central government have cut the budgets for councils and told them not to raise council tax - how is that not central government making cuts?

[ivykaty44]

Not many of my grand parents generation worked like parents have to work now.

Oh come on some people work hard some don't work so hard and some are flipping lazy - it isn't a generation monopoly.

My grandparents went without a lot during their lives and certainly didn't have the home comforts many take for granted now but that is neither generations fault it is progress

[Grennie]

The Laqbour Government had something called decent homes standards that every home was supposed to meet. The research they did showed that elderly poor owner occupiers were in the absolute worst housing. Because they did not have the money for repairs and maintenance.

Age UK I know certainly used to give out small grants for desperate expenditure e.g. the 80 year old frail woman I knew who was living in a 2 bedroom terraced house, with rain coming through the roof because she couldn't afford to mend the roof.

They always used to run out of money long before the year was up.

[Grennie]

And whenever we have a cold winter, elderly people still die because they can't afford to heat their house.

[youretoastmildred]

I was thinking about this the other day about what "comfortable" (materially) now means. I am a higher rate tax payer, DP almost is. You would think we would be rich. But we (along with so many others, good heavens I am not moaning) do not live like the middle class people of the 80s when I was growing up.

Our car dates from 1996 and is an embarrassment and I can't think how we can afford to replace it. We use it as little as possible. We are very stingy with the heating. I buy all my clothes in charity shops. I buy most of the dcs' clothes on ebay. I walk 5 miles a day to save on public transport costs. There are many things we just do not buy: juice, packaged snacks, beef, lamb, pork, anything that costs over a certain amount. I can't bear making packed lunches because I get home knackered after a 12 hour day but we can't afford £2.05 a day every day so we compromise and get dd1 two school lunches a week, which is partly for social reasons, at least that is how I justify what feels like awful decadence. There is a leak in the shower so we haven't used it for two months while we save up to get someone in to look at it.

I know these are not terrible hardships and I like to think I would be like that anyway to some extent - walking is good for you, packaged snacks are stupid junk carbs, etc. But I think about how people were when I was younger and the people on our big-housed, leafy road did not live like this. We did, and my parents made a huge song and dance about being impoverished academics. but I sold out, dammit. I work for an evil global corporation which is fucking rolling in it. I wanted a comfortable life. I didn't want my children to be like me, feeling sad and dorky in their naff shoes that look like little pies. How has this happened to me? Where is my piece?

[Grennie]

"The harsh reality of low income in later life

1 in 6 pensioners (1.8 million or 16% of pensioners in the UK) live in poverty, defined as 60% of median income after housing costs
Pensioners are also the biggest group of people on the brink of poverty with 1.2 million on the edge
Low income in retirement is often linked to earlier low pay, or time out of employment - for example, due to caring responsibilities, disability or unemployment
Women, those age 80 to 84, single people living alone, private tenants, and Pakistani and Bangladeshi people are at greater risk of pensioner poverty
The numbers of people living on low income fell between 1997/98 and 2004/5; since then there has been little improvement."

www.ageuk.org.uk/money-matters/income-and-tax/living-on-a-low-income-in-later-life/

So overall nearly two thirds of pensioners are in poverty or on the brink of it.

Maybe next time someone talks about families struggling, I should talk about how I know families with big houses in the South and swimming pools. That would prove families are not poor - wouldn't it?

[bassetfeet]

I feel so sad when I read this . Yes there are wealthy pensioners . Yes there should be means testing for winter fuel payments.
The easiest way would be to link it to pension credit for those receiving it. End of .

My Dh and I live on his state pension . I dont claim benefits and pay for all dental ,prescriptions etc . We worked hard as we all do if we can ...then illness struck . We helped our children with what little savings we had and when childcare is needed we will step in to help there .

Of course we are all in this together but I honestly dont know what more the govt can take off me ?

[expatinscotland]

Have we had 'they worked hard and paid taxes and went through the War' yet? Because of course, no one has had it hard in the past 60 years or so.

[fairy1303]

I can't even begin to express how unreasonable you are being.

I am a social worker for older people - they do not 'get part of their social care needs paid so they can leave some wealth to their families' - people with low income/savings get a proportion paid, yes, but not a great deal - and social care is expensive.
If they have to go into residential care, they can expect to have all their income taken to pay it and left with £25 per week personal allowance.

These people have worked and contributed all their lives - and you are begrudging them their winter fuel allowance?!

Adult social care has been massively cut. Care services are not great at the moment. Social workers have to fight for every allocated penny.

I feel sick reading your post.

[fairy1303]

expat happy to contribute that line!

[Grennie]

Totally, totally agree fairy. These are well off people jealous of their well off parents. They need a reality check.

[expatinscotland]

Yep, there we go: worked and contributed. No one else does. We will get sweet FA and work till we drop, no 'we worked and contributed all our lives' for us.

[Grennie]

expat - Will you be one of the current two thirds of elderly people living in poverty or on the edge of poverty? Or do you just mean you won't be able to retire early like some well off pensioners have?

[expatinscotland]

Simple: NO MORE universal benefits. For anyone. Link them to those claiming pension tax credit and cut it for everyone else.

We are all in this together.