To think free bus passes for the old should be abolished?

[Bumpitybumper]

Statistics show that on average wealth peaks at age 65-74 in the UK, why then do we give these people free bus passes? It makes absolutely no sense at all and is just an unnecessary expense. The idea that 'young' pensioners are a relatively poor group of people is completely incorrect and it only serves to enhance the already massive intergenerational wealth gap between baby boomers and everyone else.

@Mytholmroyd I don't think pensioners/baby boomers have engineered property prices but equally one of the issues is the constant talk about pensioners living in poverty. Yes of course some do, but by pretty much all measures pensioners have relatively low poverty rates. There are so many other groups that have far far higher rates if poverty eg children, the disabled, families with a child under 4, and families with more than three kids but still through this thread everyone keeps going back to the idea of the pensioner living in poverty as the reason to give a benefit to all pensioners (because means testing is too hard). 20% of children in England are facing hunger and hardship. 5% of pensioners in England are. 5% is of course too many but it is below average for the population. 20% is a lot of children, who surely are as deserving of support as pensioners (Source - and this was from a report from 2024).

I think (genuinely) a lot of people don't realise how much this position has changed over the last 30-40 years.

[I don't actually think taking the bus pass away will make much difference to children living in food poverty, and i wouldn't advocate for that, but this is why I struggle when people justify a benefit for all pensions because some are in poverty.]

To be fair, not all younger people are like the very nasty bitter OP, my adult children are not.
There is a thread now on Gransnet about this, I suggest OP go over there and educate herself/him.

I don't think ANYONE in the UK should be living in poverty @gesturecritic it is a scandal which we seem to just accept now. I had never heard of a food bank until relatively recently - I grew up in a working class town in West Yorkshire and nobody needed a food bank. People got married and got a council house.

They government really ought to raise the income tax threshold to the minimum wage at least - how they can justify taxing people who can't afford to live and pay for basic necessities is beyond me.

These poverty rates for children are nothing new and children have always had the highest poverty rates as an (age) group but what's changed is that pensioner poverty rates have halved since 1994. So in 1994 poverty rates for pensioners were nearly as bad as got children, but now they've dropped to below population average. Looking at dates, I think the driver of the change was introduction of MIG/pension credit in the 2000s. [Side note - interesting that the story always is that pensioners vote Tory and that's why they get things like free bus passes but the biggest impact came under a labour government]

Obviously it is good pensioner poverty rates have dropped, and obviously 5% in food poverty is too much but the reality is that whilst there are pensioners in poverty, they are way way better than the UK average. There are lots of different measures of poverty but pensioners are the lowest in all of them.

I’m a boomer, born early 60’s…..I don’t get to retire until 67, so we’re pretty much in the same boat!

This. And means rating will just mean my poor elderly mum who still has to work in her 70s to support herself as she is just over the pension credit threshold, would lose another tiny bit of help after losing the winter fuel allowance.

Can we stop all this anti-pensioner rubbish. They are not the reason why you are poor and our country has gone to shit.

I'm not nasty or bitter. Just because I don't think free bus passes should be issued to 65-74 year olds it doesn't make me some weird hater of pensioners. By the same logic, anyone that agrees with any restrictions on Child Benefits is. nasty and bitter about children or anyone that doesn't agree with unlimited maternity leave is nasty and bitter about women of child bearing age.

I have a different opinion to you and lots of the people who have posted on this thread who unsurprisingly seem to be disproportionately pensioners. I don't need to be 'educated' into agreeing with you. My opinions are based on statistics and facts and a belief that we don't have an infinite money tree that could fund everything we would like as a society. My focus isn't about taking something from people but how this money can and should be used elsewhere.

I have stated many times that I am in favour of retaining free bus passes for the over 75s. Before this age, health issues are much less likely to impact one's ability to drive so the public safety argument reduces significantly.

I think this is very area dependent as many other posters have confirmed. Some posters (like yourself) seem to think only the poor would use the bus, whereas my lived experience is that the old people I know regularly use the bus as it is quite pleasant and avoid parking charges.

Just to add, I started this thread whilst on a bus. I use the bus frequently and have a car and enough money to use taxis if I want to. I have actively chosen to use the bus like so many old people in my area do. If the buses were such a terrible option then I wouldn't have been on them in the first place to notice how many wealthy pensioners were on the bus too!

If we are serious about the environment and climate change getting cars off the road and getting people on public transportation is a massive leap forward. How many more people would use it if it were free for everyone ?

This. I find current attitudes towards the elderly very worrying indeed. We, if lucky, will all be old one day. Be careful what you wish for OP. A civilisation that does not look after it's elderly is not a civilisation at all. Who will your bitterness be directed at next? The disabled?

Why am I being bitter? Explain to me why thinking 65-74 year olds shouldn't be issued with a free bus pass makes me bitter? Does agreeing with the child benefit cap make me bitter too or having thoughts on Council Tax reform?

At least young people in Scotland get free bus travel too though.

There seems to be an assumption on thia thread that wealthy pensioners who drive don't use public transport. I can't speak for elsewhere in the country, but in London and the South East they absolutely do. Often, as I said upthread,over 65s are using their free public transport to come into town because they are still working - and working in well paid, professional jobs.

My comments upthread were criticised as "politics of envy". I don't understand quite what is meant by that, but I don't agree.

As a society, we have limited economic resources. A financial benefit from public funds that goes to one person is a financial benefit not going to another.

The over-65s benefit enormously through non-means tested benefits, while as a cohort having a far greater share of the wealth than younger generations. And a lot of that wealth has come through rising property values and capital gains, and is untaxed. Comments about not having central heating when growing up are a red herring - and if we are going down that route, how many young people are living within disrepair, or overcrowding, partly as a consequence of property becoming unaffordable?

This isn't wanting to "punish" older people, or trap little old ladies eeking out a meagre pension in their own homes. It is looking at how, fairly, resources are allocated across society so that we can all benefit from public services while additional support goes where it is most needed.

Pointing out that some pensioners aren't wealthy isn't an answer. No-one is saying that all of them are. Just like those of us who don't want men in women's prisons, toilets, and hospital wards don't say that all men are rapists. The fact that some pensioners aren't wealthy, or experienced the tail-end of rationing, or whatever, doesn't mean that we shouldn't look to allocate resources fairly across society as a whole.

And yes, it would be lovely to go to a world of milk and honey where we could have triple locked pensions, wider child benefit, etc etc, but in the meantime we have to accept that we live in a world of limited, and diminishing resources, and the "bulge" presented by aging (but often healthy) baby boomers distorts what is available elsewhere.

@ThePiglet I agree completely but this kind of sensible and reasoned post will fall on deaf ears. You are jealous, mean spirited and resentful for even daring to question whether 65-74 year olds should be entitled to a free bus pass. You will be accused of wanting all pensioners to die alone in cold houses (at least 6 posters have accused me of this). You can see why politicians largely don't dare to tackle this group in the way that they happily target working people despite the fact that the younger people don't have a hope in hell of being as wealthy at retirement age as the current group of 65-74 year olds.

There is great affection in this country for our older people and I think most people have a visceral response to the idea that we are taking something away from them. Many of us have grown up with the idea that pensioners are the poorest in society but this simply isn't true anymore. Young pensioners are now the wealthiest but some people are completely unwilling to even acknowledge this objective fact that can be corroborated by lots of official sources. As long as this continues then resources will be allocated according to age as opposed to need which is something I fundamentally disagree with.

Yeah I really don't recognise this "buses are for the poor only" thing. Absolutely every pensioner I know - and most of them are wealthy and also run a car - also use the bus for some trips.

For lots of reasons - city centre lack of parking is a big one but also because taking the bus isn't a hideous experience.. it's actually quite pleasant to look out of the window/read a book and not have to focus on driving

Yes, it's almost a weird kind of gas lighting to tell someone sat on a bus that isn't poor and owns their own car that only those with no other alternative would possibly use a bus. There are many posters on this thread though that are absolutely insistent that this is the case though and won't hear otherwise despite other posters like yourself sharing the fact that lots of people choose to use a bus in their area.

Yes, the 70s were good for many but we were in the middle of a recession - my late DH had his own business at the time (a little older than your DPs) and could not understand the difficulties he was having until much later when he realised the country (the world) was in a downturn. And the frequency of families living in one room with shared facilities took a nose-dive, thanks partly to the new town movement, whilst jobs were easy to get because there was a labour shortage.
22 is young to buy a house though, even in the 70s and I did not buy a house until I was 27 (and exDH 37), despite having a degree (but no job, I got married which severely impeded my career since though marriage was no longer a bar to employment being married limited my ability to move to a job and there was also the unspoken 'maternity' bar i.e. I didn't get jobs because I might leave to have a baby - also I could not drive). My first house (not our first choice, which was an 8k terrace in the south east - impossible to pay even with the two salaries we had at that point) was 6.5k. We just made the deposit and payments were £65 a month a significant amount on one salary (we'd moved for my DH's job and I could not get one) of 1.3k pa (that's 1,300 a year before tax and a good salary) even with the mortgage tax relief (which was taken away in the late 90s, presumably because by then most people had mortgages). Our second house was 10k and I had a baby (so not working, as was normal), payments were about £80 a month on my exDH's slightly larger salary of c2k - but there was a thousand pound retention because of damp, so we had to find that before we completed. Then in the 80s, when we had increased our mortgage to extend (2 DC) the interests rates went up to 15%, not for a few months but for years, though actual rates varied they were still high - we also hit the ERM crisis which caused a recession. It is a mistake to assume people were better off - you cannot compare like with like between times, which any historian knows. (A duke with 50k pa in 1750 led a life of incredible privilege, today a landlord would be prosecuted for the sanitary, sewage and heating conditions that same duke enjoyed).
Baby boomers are better off now but they have worked and paid for what they have. It is not their fault that globalisation and neo-liberalism, both of which work against the ambition of the young and the spread and redistribution of wealth, have wrecked economies and the social contract (deliberately smashed by neo-liberalism). And in 40 years' time those young now will be saying the same things to the young people of the future.

The funny things about this thread are...

a) surely we want people to travel by bus - reduced congestion, reduced damage to roads, reduced air pollution, reduced carbon footprint, reduced need for parking in towns.

b) having a free bus pass is all very well but where I live there are no buses. They were scrapped years ago.

Subsidised bus passes for school children and pensioners, help support and maintain bus services for the rest of us.

So short sighted.

@Bumpitybumper I very much doubt that @ThePiglet will get the responses you predict. Whether or not you agree with her post, it's clear and well reasoned and she doesn't come across as jealous, mean spirited or resentful, at least to me.

The bottom line is that giving subsidies to a particular section of the population is more than just a financial decision. All sorts of other things are taken into account, for example what we as a society believe is right, to protect the vulnerable, to encourage certain behaviours and discourage others, to keep prior commitments, and more. Different people have different views on the merits of these other arguments and indeed, the same argument may apply in one part of the country but not in another. The financial one doesn't always take precedence. Insisting that it should is what across as narrow minded.

A) I completely agree hence again why I was on the bus. I generally am a massive fan of public transport. If we have a budget of £700 million though to spend on concessionary travel then I don't believe that targeting those aged 65-74 with free bus passes is anymore environmentally friendly than targeting other age groups. Arguably if we could switch more commuters of working age to using public transport over driving to work each day then this would have the biggest impact on congestion and 'saved' journeys.

B) this is obviously because even with the government effectively paying for pensioner travel then the bus routes weren't being used enough to be economically viable. If we want to use the £700 million to keep bus routes open then we should be looking strategically at which routes are most needed for a whole range of factors. Not making some buses seemingly economically viable but only because that particular bus route is favoured by pensioners that are using it because they get to travel for free. Can't you see how this can skew the statistics? If we allowed 35-45 year olds to travel for free then it is totally possible that a completely different set of bus routes would magically become economically viable because they are the buses this group of people prefer to use.

Mumsnet is just super weird about public transport

I have seen so many threads in which it's just a casual assumption that it's for people who don't have a car/can't drive and is such an awful experience etc.

One for example asking about their elderly mother taking the train and so many responses basically saying you can't put your mother through a train journey, you must drive 6 hours to get her.

I think some people are just super convinced that only the dregs of society would do anything other than drive

I think this is where the disagreement ultimately lies. If you took away free bus passes from those aged 65-74 years old then they would be free to buy a ticket and use the buses like the rest of society. Nobody would be forcing them off a bus or trapping them in their houses. So the argument isn't about whether this age group should be using buses which of course they would always be at liberty to use but whether the government should be funding them to do so when they don't fund other groups that suffer from higher levels of poverty and have a lower median net wealth. It's a financial benefit so financial considerations are very important.

The other arguments I have heard for this group being prioritised have tended to centre on a few things that I fundamentally disagree with:

1. Public safety concerns about old people driving - not a huge issue until people turn 75+
2. People think they are 'entitled' to a bus pass having paid taxes all their lives - it has been proven that this age group will be net beneficiaries on the welfare system so will get more than they have paid in without the free bus passes being issues
3. There are poor pensioners - young pensioners are actually relatively wealthy and enjoy low levels of poverty.
4. Only poor people catch buses so what does it matter anyway? - lots of posters suggesting the opposite is true in many areas
5. Free bus passes help to keep bus routes open - the £700 million spent on concessionary travel will always help keep bus routes open. If you reallocated it to other groups then this would also keep bus routes open, just other people would be using the buses
6. Free bus passes keep people off the roads and are green - again, this would be true for all age groups if they were given a bus pass. Arguably peak travel is the biggest issue so it would be better for the purposes of congestion and air quality to target commuters rather than pensioners.

There you go! That's the complex arguments you have alluded to and that's what I think of them. Like you say, I'm sure you think differently and that's fine.

Yes, it's almost a weird kind of gas lighting to tell someone sat on a bus that isn't poor and owns their own car that only those with no other alternative would possibly use a bus. There are many posters on this thread though that are absolutely insistent that this is the case though and won't hear otherwise despite other posters like yourself sharing the fact that lots of people choose to use a bus in their area.

Great one less car on the road. I'd target something else and leave pensioners alone with bus passes.

Where I live they have reduced the bus service so much that now I suspect only pensioners use it. There are no buses in the morning earlier enough to get people to work or school and none after 4.30 from the town back into the village.

If pensioners stopped using it I doubt we would have one at all.