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Comments and significant Press Releases from the NPC
Labour
Party Responses
Lib-Dem Responses
Conservative Party Responses
Turner leaves today's
pensioners out in the cold and offers just £1.36 a week more in five years'
time
Britain's biggest pensioner organisation - the
National Pensioners Convention (NPC) - has criticised the long awaited
report by the Pensions Commission for ignoring the needs of today's 11m
older people.
In the 1000-page report Lord Turner makes only
three recommendations that would affect today's pensioners:
- Linking the basic state pension to earnings
in 2010
- Keeping the means-tested Pension Credit but
freezing the payments for those with modest savings
- Paying a universal state pension to those
aged 75 and over without saying when it should be introduced
The NPC point out that Lord Turner's ommission
to recommend immediately raising the basic state pension and to delay
linking it to earnings until 2010, is offering today's pensioners a
mere £1.36 a week more than they will receive anyway under the present
system.
For example: today's full basic state pension is
£82.05 a week. If it rises by the government's minimum increase of 2.5% it
would reach £90.25 in 2009. The difference between increasing it in 2010 by
prices 2.5% (£2.25) and earnings 4% (£3.61) is just £1.36 a week.
Joe Harris, NPC general secretary said: "It's
taken the Pensions Commission three years and the best it can offer today's
pensioners is a £1.36 a week increase in their basic state pension if they
manage to live another five years. It's absolutely outrageous. One in five
older people live below the official poverty line and the majority of them
are women. The recommendations leave today's pensioners completely out in
the cold. Lord Turner may talk about not wanting to engage in fairytale
economics - but his recommendations for today's pensioners look like they've
been written by the Brothers Grimm."
"Pensioners want the basic state pension raised
immediately to the level of the means-tested Pension Credit of £109.45 a
week and then linked to earnings for it to be meaningful. It is in the
interests of the entire population that these modest improvements are paid
for out of the national insurance fund and its healthy surplus of £34.6bn."
"If the government wants today's 11m pensioners
- who are 20% of the electorate - to join any consensus on pension reform,
they must raise the basic state pension for all men and women and link it to
earnings now."
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