An extra hubdred for OAPS?

[RaggedRocks]

The government wants us to keep cash at home for emergencies. Many pensioners are struggling to pay their bills and don't have a spare 100 quid.

AIBU to think that they should add an extra hundred onto the WFA in the budget, so oldies can have some spare cash to keep for the coming emergency. Also consider an extra hundred for UC recipients.

Ok so 1 in 5, soon to be 2 in 5 thats still a lot of people paying rent and if you've divorced in your 50s or 60s your less likely to be in a social hosing property..

Where people who have always rented will have had name on housing list for decades and will be more likely to have a social rented house.

Oh and thinking of the 1 in 10 paying 40% tax I wonder what percentage of them are actually people who are still working even if beyond Government pension age.

I thought council tax increases were capped at 5%.

And those working-age people you’re so keen to dismiss? They’re paying taxes, National Insurance, mortgages, rent, childcare, food, utilities and everything else, while also funding the pensions being paid today.

As they always have. I have no idea where this idea that today's working-age people invented hardship, are the first generation of parents to struggle financially and are the first cohort to pay for others' pensions.
The constant whining and moaning about pensioners and blaming them for all the ills of their lives is tiresome

Extremely tiresome. Everyone working and paying tax for the last 80 years has paid for at least two generations’ pensions, not to mention two generations’ education.

I honestly cannot fathom this constant wallowing in victimhood, although I suppose it's easier to blame others than work around the challenges you face.
We are doing young people no favours with this constant rhetoric of never being able to afford a house, never have a pension etc.
My daughter is 22 and training to be a teacher. She is utterly convinced she will never be able to afford to buy a house, without even looking into it, as that's what she sees day-in, day-out on social media and TV.

Well you got the number right op £100. Pretty good. Even if the people it’s going to is broader.

Repeating something doesn't make it true.

Pensioners are more likely to be in fuel poverty (ONS/Rowntree foundation figures) than working families and millennials are set to be notably richer than their boomer parents. Don't believe all the propaganda from self appointed lobby groups, making a nice little income from grievance politics.

Most pensioners are not sitting on fat savings pots - typical savings pots are a fraction of typical retirement pots and the average occupational built pension pot produces a pension of a few thousand a year - not tens of thousands. Just enough in fact to prevent access to most of the benefits designed for older people - which coupled with tax exemptions announced for pensioners with only the state pension is an incentive to 50-somethings to cash in modest pension pots and blow the lot as they will have saved just enough to exclude them from any help.

Even home owning pensioners have housing costs - not least the cost of maintenance on the older properties they tend to have.

The differential between rich and poor in every generation is the gap to address, not sweeping assumptions that all boomers had it easy and all millennials are struggling. My millennial and gen z graduates are doing very nicely and on the property ladder, the group most likely to be living in poverty are boomer single women. That doesn't mean all millennials are wealthy and all boomers are poverty stricken it simply reflects that every generation has haves and have nots. Making policy based on grievance politics rather than actual data is simply stupid.

google :

"can councils increase council tax by more than 5% per year"

So the short answer is, yes they can, under certain circumstances.

God I'm so tired of the poor pensioner narrative. It's extremely jarring especially nowadays when so many families are struggling. There's not even the "they fought in the war" argument anymore

Repeating something doesn’t make it true.

Quite. So let’s actually look at the figures, shall we?

You cite the ONS and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, but the official DWP figures for 2024/25 show relative poverty after housing costs at 14% for pensioners, 19% for working-age adults and 27% for children. So my original point that pensioners have lower poverty rates is factually correct.

You then claim pensioners are more likely to experience fuel poverty than working families. Interesting, because the Child Poverty Action Group’s 2025 projections put fuel poverty at 8.8% for pensioner couples, 15.1% for single pensioners and 23.8% for households with children, using the same measure.

Perhaps you’d like to share the particular statistics you’re relying on, because those figures certainly don’t support your sweeping assertion.

Then there’s your claim that millennials are set to be richer than their boomer parents. Richer in what sense? Current wealth? Retirement wealth? Anticipated inheritance? The Resolution Foundation found that millennials born in the early 1980s could have £45,000 LESS pension wealth at age 60 than the youngest boomers. It also found that homeownership is taking millennials considerably longer to achieve than their parents’ generation. So simply declaring that millennials will be richer doesn’t address the issue of their financial circumstances in retirement, which was precisely what I was discussing.

You also appear to be confusing pension savings, pension income and total household wealth. A small occupational pension doesn’t automatically exclude someone from benefits. Pension Credit assesses overall circumstances, and there’s no absolute savings limit.

As for the suggestion that people should cash in their pensions and spend the money to qualify for benefits, that’s a rather extraordinary recommendation. Deliberately disposing of assets to increase benefit entitlement can fall foul of deprivation-of-capital rules. It certainly isn’t a sensible general retirement strategy.

And yes, homeowners have maintenance costs. I’m not sure why you think that needs explaining. Having to maintain a mortgage-free property is still an entirely different financial position from having to maintain a property AND pay a mortgage, or pay rent indefinitely. The property is also an asset, which seems to have been conveniently overlooked.

Finally, your millennial and Gen Z graduates doing nicely is wonderful, but it’s anecdotal. You cannot dismiss national statistical trends by pointing to your own children. I’m a millennial doing quite nicely but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to enjoy the same retirement as my mum or that my generation in general isn’t going to find it more difficult.

The really peculiar thing about your response is that you’ve spent several paragraphs explaining that some pensioners are poor and some millennials are wealthy, when I never suggested otherwise. In fact, you’ve inadvertently reinforced my entire argument. There are people in genuine financial difficulty across every generation, which is precisely why I believe financial assistance should be targeted according to need rather than distributed indiscriminately according to age or another broad category. You appear to agree with that principle while simultaneously arguing against me for expressing it.

And accusing people of falling for propaganda and grievance politics while misrepresenting their argument and selectively invoking statistics is rather ironic.

Perhaps read what I actually wrote rather than what you’d have preferred me to have written.

Shall we just roll over and agree that today's young families have the worst deal since time began and no generation has ever known such hardship?
Would that make you feel better?

This! On average they are not poor. Some are and those are the ones we need to help, but most aren’t. It infuriates me when they talk as though they are so hard done by, I would love to be in on their pension schemes, dancing my way to a final salary pension from the ages of 65 to 90+

Personally I'm bored shitless of the whining about boomers (and I'm not even in that group) and the pretence that they led charmed lives whilst millennials are having it tougher than any previous generation.

Its nonsense. There were fortunate boomers but most (like X'ers) were raised with a material standard of living and opportunities which the average millennial would consider impoverished. Many still live in poverty, especially the older single women.

Plenty of millennials have had a massive hand up onto the property ladder courtesy of the better off boomers passing down deposits on houses and lump sums or subsidising their route into professions not available to their parents. Or by buying homes in less expensive areas. Others struggle as their parents are in the majority of older people who don't have vast amounts of cash to hand down.

Look and individuals rather than rubbishing entire cohorts based on sloppy thinking.

And I am so tired of the uniquely struggling young families narrative. It's as if no families have ever struggled before now.

Or, and here’s a radical suggestion, you could just respond to what I’ve actually said rather than inventing an entirely different argument.

Nobody has suggested that today’s young families have suffered more than any generation in human history. I’ve made a straightforward point about relative poverty, generational wealth and the appropriate targeting of financial support.

If you disagree with the figures, challenge them. If you disagree with targeted support, explain why.
But pretending I’ve claimed that modern families have it worse than people living through the Great Depression, two world wars or the Black Death is rather ridiculous.

And no, agreeing with me wouldn’t make me feel better. I’m interested in facts, not validation. Are you?

I think you’re confusing material living standards with financial opportunity.

Yes, previous generations generally had fewer consumer goods, less technology and lower material living standards. Nobody is disputing that. But having a smartphone and central heating doesn’t automatically make housing more affordable or retirement more financially secure.

And your point about millennials getting onto the property ladder with help from their boomer parents is rather revealing.

If younger adults increasingly rely on parental wealth to buy a home, that’s hardly evidence that the housing market is working wonderfully for them. It demonstrates that access to homeownership can depend heavily on how wealthy their parents happen to be.

You’ve even acknowledged that those without wealthy parents struggle, which rather reinforces the point.

As for buying in cheaper areas, that’s not a universal solution. People have jobs, families and caring responsibilities, and cheaper housing doesn’t necessarily mean equivalent employment opportunities or earnings.

Nobody needs to pretend that every boomer had a charmed life or that every millennial is struggling to acknowledge differences in housing affordability, wealth accumulation and retirement prospects between generations.

And of course there are poor pensioners, particularly single older women. Their circumstances absolutely deserve attention. But identifying poverty within one generation doesn’t somehow invalidate comparisons between generations.

Finally, telling people to look at individuals rather than cohorts misses the purpose of population statistics. We use those statistics to identify patterns and inequalities that aren’t visible from individual anecdotes.

You can acknowledge that previous generations experienced genuine hardship while also recognising that younger generations face different structural financial disadvantages.

Those two things aren’t remotely contradictory.

The problem you are also missing is that nobody is complaining about the life current pensioners have, they’re complaining that the ‘poor pensioner’ narrative is not accurate. It’s not an attack on pensioners, it’s just being fed up of hearing those who have wealth acting like they don’t when people have real struggles.

Families have always struggled.

That’s hysterical, I’m a pensioner and my idea of a great night is a cup of tea whilst watching a film and then bed by 9pm with a good book. For your information I’m just 70 and have been working full time with overtime since I was just turned 15 years old, plus worked Saturdays shampooing, making tea and sweeping up since I was 11 years old believe it or not. I’ve NEVER been on benefits as we grew up in those days to be told you don’t ask for handouts when you’ve put nothing in the system and even then you don’t go on them ….you work! My retirement age was supposed to be 60 until we got shafted with no notice, then found out we had to work until we were 66, by which time I’d not only looked after my husband’s parents, my stepfather and my own parents alongside working. I finally retired and needed operations etc as health was bad, then suddenly husband got dementia so am now his carer. So what I’m saying is please don’t begrudge a pensioner a piddly £100 and no
i m not talking about myself but there are a lot of lonely pensioners out there who are often widowed etc and live from pension day to pension day and remember NO our pensions are NOT a benefit, they are a pension we’ve paid into every week of our working life that was then promised back to each individual when they turned 60 years old. So would you begrudge someone on for example UN a spare £100 just because they’ve got kids or is it just that your generation seem to think our generation should be lined up against a wall and shot when we got to 67?
Please remember our generation paved the way and laid the foundations down for your generation, our parents fought to save this country so you and us are not speaking German today! I’m not trying to lecture anyone but a little more understanding of your elders experience might help you understand we need a bit of kindness too. It’s not our generation either that has got this Country into the mess it’s in we are with you in what a mess the UK is in.

The only pensioners we know living well are either public servants or police in our cul de sac. They've slogged through the same employer for 30 year's and are earning good pensions.

They've flown every other year to Australia first class, both NHS retired. To see family. Otherwise they take holidays in the UK three or four times a year.

Others took the lump sum and spent it on their home she said around £300k but it's now suitable for infirmity when it rocks up.

You do spend less all round when you retire though but you have less outgoings and more time.

I worked with a company back in the early 2000s, they had 5 people all with decades of service, all less than 12 months to their final salary pensions, including a lady who'd been their since she was 15.

Boom company went bust and the pensions went with it.

But can I also remind you that pensions weren't compulsory to offer employees, lots of companies pensions were only offered to 'staff' not 'workers', ie your people who worked in the office, but not the people on the factory floor or the people actually doing the job.

More people wouldn't have had a final salary pension than did.

Oh absolutely I realise most didn’t have them, but many did, and doesn’t mean I don’t wish I had one.

If I was offered one now I would snap someone’s hand off for it.

They tie people to companies, and often companies paid low because of it, they knew people wouldn't want to leave the pension and often salaries would be bumped up in the last couple of years of working life as thats what the person would be calculated on.

When your dreaming about it remind yourself of that lady, 44 years banging away on a typewriter / wordprocessor and your pension is down the drain.

You know that giving the anecdotal evidence is really not at all useful in the conversation. I’m not wishing I had the scenario you described, I’m wishing I had the final salary pension that many people have and are being paid out on.

Why is it that people always focus on the exceptions rather than the general situation.

A small occupational pension doesn’t automatically exclude someone from benefits.

It does. Benefits for pensioners - apart from housing benefit - are capped at the level of the new state pension. Nobody with an occupational pension qualifies for pension credit.

Deliberately disposing of assets to increase benefit entitlement can fall foul of deprivation-of-capital rules.

Those rules don’t apply to benefits, especially a decade or more previously. They apply to care home fees.

You talk a good game @Boreded but you really need to check your facts once in a while.