To be angry with people who describe the old age pension as a "benefit"?

[FlubandSlub]

When I started my working life, aged 16, I entered into an agreement with the government for them to save my pension money for me. It was stated that it would be until I turned 60 which would be when I could starting drawing my old age pension. Even though I made my FULL pension payment contributions by the time I turned 51 the government has decided it will not abide by the original agreement and that it is going to keep MY money until I am 67. Probably hoping I will die before then.

Consider this, not only did I contribute to my pension, my employer did too. It totalled 15% of my income before taxes. If you averaged only £15 000 p a. over your working life, that's close to £220,500. Read that again. Did you see anywhere that the Government paid in one single penny?

We are talking about the money that I and my employer put in a Government bank to ensure that I would have a retirement pension. It was not money that the Government had any right to spend on other things! Upon reaching the age to take it back they've started to call the money we paid in a "benefit" !

If you calculate the future invested value of £2500 per year (yours & your employer's contribution) at a simple 5% interest (that's less than what the govtpays on the money that it borrows from overseas), after 49 years of working you'd have
£892,919.98.

This money was supposed to be in a securely locked box, not to be used as part of the Government's general funds.
Successive governments borrowed the money to spend on other things but that doesn't make my pension some kind of charity or handout!! If a private pension company did this we would sue them. Unfortunately the Government can legally rob us blind and get away with it

IT'S MY MONEY! IT IS NOT A BENEFIT!!

I thought if you qualified for PIP before pension age it continued into old age.

Yep, with the exception of means tested benefits, which are a safety net, a number of UK state benefits are dependent on the last two years of NI contributions. So if, for example, you claimed contribution based employment and support allowance for five years and stopped claiming, say to return to work, you would not be eligible for that benefit again until you had amassed another two years NI contributions.

OP absolutely owned by uncle gpt here

PIP does continue after state pension age provided the claim does not end before you reach that age. And a PIP claim will only continue for as long as you continue to satisfy the eligibility criteria, which gets more difficult with age, because PIP is a working age benefit and only considers the effects of disability and not age related conditions.

PIP does not attract automatic NI contributions. And PIP is not an income replacement benefit - it’s meant as a contribution towards the extra cost of living with a disability - surely you’re not suggesting that disabled people would be expected to live on just PIP ?

Whether it's a benefit or not is just semantics. Why does it matter?
You are unreasonable if you have ever assumed that the state pension would be anything more than a bare minimum amount that may or may not be enough to keep you alive.
I get that people are sick of paying into something when they end up getting very little back, but that's more true of other benefits than the state pension. We clearly cannot afford that any more and people are unwilling to keep paying. But the state pension is not the major part of that problem, there are far more egregious examples.

if Your employer has contributed to your pension than this is your employers private workplace pension. The government doesn’t out anything into this

within your workplace pension you might he being charged fees to the pension provider. However er this is all totally separate to the state pension that is paid for via national insurance contributions.

Your NI contributions go towards funding the state pension (of current retirees) and the NHS (which is also topped up from other taxes as necessary). When you retire and become eligible for the statutory benefit of the state pension (it is a benefit, like that or not) then the current crop of working people will be paying NI and other taxes to fund you. That's how it has always been.

Your NI contributions DO NOT go into an account or pot of money that is set aside in a safe purely for you. You never entered into any such agreement with the government and nor have any of us. NI isn't and never was a savings scheme.

What you might be confusing things with is a private workplace pension, which employers now do have to provide for their employees. You pay a percentage of your salary into this scheme each month, your employer also adds a percentage and you also get tax relief from the government, so they pay some in too. These really are tax efficient savings and investment schemes in a way that NI simply isn't. You can draw on them from the age of 55 too, whereas for most of us state pension kicks in at age 67 at the moment.

I'm afraid you have shown some ignorance here, but hopefully you understand better now.

I am totally with you OP
Couldn't agree more.
The problem is those posting on here you have no entitlement to a pension won't be close to retirement age, I think you get a very different perspective on things once you are.

Some benefits are universal and that’s how it should be. Why should wealthy people who are earning and contributing much more via be exempt from the state pension ? That would require the social contract to be rewritten, which would have ramifications for us all. I know at least two people who are very wealthy and have not claimed the state pension on reaching retirement age. It’s not paid automatically, you have to claim it and I’m sure many wealthy people don’t. Their choice.

I know some people who think disabled people should live on fresh air. No PIP, no ESA.

@FlubandSlubare you reading anyone's replies?

But the state pension is not the major part of that problem, there are far more egregious examples.

The state pension presently accounts for 58% of the benefits budget, so I’d say that’s a pretty significant part of the problem.

If the state pension is going to change they should change it for all school age children giving them plenty of time to prepare.

And they all seem to be on MN !! I’ve had some doozies of arguments surrounding this on various threads, but l’ve never yet encountered anyone saying that sick or disabled people shouldn’t qualify for state pension if they can’t work - or as I suspect is the case here, expected to survive on PIP alone when that was never the intention of the benefit. Until today. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the social contract and the safety net that social security represents. It’s depressing.

The confidence of the ill informed always amazes me. OP where did you get your information from?

That’s similar to the argument used by the WASPIES. Given short shrift on most MN threads.

The government views the state pension as a benefit. If, as a carer (which many pensioners find themselves becoming), you claim carer’s allowance, it’s seen as an overlapping benefit and it’s deducted from your pension. So old people caring for an infirm or vulnerable spouse effectively do it for nothing. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Agree with what. The OP is fundamentally wrong about everything she posted.

£22 billion goes unclaimed every year. The benefits budget is just fine.

But that’s irrelevant to the main point, which is that we understood (correctly) that we were paying in then so that our pensions would be paid in the future.

Yes, the actual money we paid went to the people drawing their pensions while we were working. But in return the next generation would pay our pensions and so on. It’s not a state handout, it’s the state honouring the contract under which we paid in.

Calling it a benefit is an insult.

@FlubandSlub
Do you think that your workplace pension is the same thing as a state pension?

Informing school leavers of the pension change gives them 50 plus years to prepare.

Waspi women were not informed until late 50s age range thus giving them insufficient time to prepare.

That some goes unclaimed is not evidence of affordability.

But the OP is talking about the pension payments she has made through work, and her employer’s contributions. Thats an entirely separate private workplace pension scheme.

I’m not entirely sure she knows what national insurance contributions are.

What?!? The government are now claiming a person's private pension is a benefit?
People will STOP paying into any pensions invest instead.