The State Pension is NOT a Benefit, but people do get mixed up by what it is since it is paid by the Dept of Work and Pensions who also do pay Benefits such as JSA. JSA etc is a safety net and is why some chose to call it welfare. It is a form of alms except it is administered by the State. On the other hand the State contracted with you to pay a State Pension.I agree it is quite wrong in principle to have, in the future, a flat State Pension, unlike now where we recognise that you can be paid more if you meet certain criteria.Trouble is we just cannot afford it. So we won’t get a higher rate of SP, even though under today’s’ rules we would qualify for it.What is happening is that Gordon Brown could not countenance old people living in a state of poverty with them not (at the same time) being able to do anything about it like getting another job. So he gave us Pension Credit. It’s the best bit of social engineering he did. At a stroke he reduced the impecunious circumstances of a large group of people. Cameron also is very reluctant to reduce this Benefit at the moment or take the elders back to the bad old days. Long may that remain. Tony Blair wanted to take another very large group out of poverty as well. Those little blighters less than 18 years old. To some extent he did that, but he did not hit the numbers he wanted. The Coalition has not been so sympathetic to their cause. The DWP costs us a fortune. There are some 1.5 to 2M pensioners who do not claim PC. That is for endless reasons. But clearly the Government does not want that to continue. I have always agreed with that. Get all pensioners onto a minimum, i.e. around £143 and reduce processing PC claims. That will bring in a lot of departmental savings.Once that system is installed we can at least say that no pensioner should claim real poverty. We then have to consider how we reward those who have worked and those who have worked some of the time. If they have paid tax which is partly used to fund today’s pensioner, then they have to be rewarded with more than those who have not paid in or paid in little. They have to seen as being better off in old age than those who have not worked, or not much.The same desire to reduce departmental costs goes for the Personal Allowance for people younger than pensioners. Raise the threshold to £10K and far less HMRC processing will be required – both on tax returns as well as Tax Credits. The penalty is that Pensioners will lose the age allowance which I think is wrong – but the argument will be that we can no longer afford the age allowance let alone the associated costs of processing. In my view the threshold needs to rise above inflation for some years to come.No escaping that most of us will be poorer. The Empire has been extinguished and there are too many people in this country and indeed on the planet.
George Knox ● 4998d