Pensioners are treated as third
rate citizens in the United Kingdom, which no longer appears united to them.
They are a welfare liability, whose costs and care we can no longer afford, to
be kept at near poverty levels, sometimes in conditions no better than the old
workhouses.
There is at present a great
“holier than thou” uproar about the mistreatment in hospitals, care homes etc.,
which is not representative of the many who look after the elderly, sick and
needy, in hospitals, local councils, charities down to just neighbourly acts.
The real reasons for any poor
treatment always come down to money and hence time, there is an obsession with
cutting costs, we have mass production time and motion experts, supermarket and
financial guru’s all trying to get a quart out of a pint pot.
This is particularly so in the
Public Sector, where excellent service is expected for little or no cost; no
one sits down and works out what the need is for a good service and costs it
properly and then looks at what we can afford and the best allocation of
resources.
They know the number of doctors,
nurses and social workers required per patient, but then insist on making do
with half the number, who they blame when things go wrong. We spend a fortune
looking over our shoulder with expensive committees, reviews and enquiries to
tell us what common sense should do.
The main blame for the attitude
to pensioners must lie with the State and successive Governments, who have reduced
what should have been a successful National Insurance contributory pension
scheme to rubble, not meeting inflation increases and replacing them with
welfare benefits until everything is now benefit.
Yet all their working life they
paid their taxes and also substantial NI pension contributions for their
retirement future. This money was not put aside to accumulate and grow, but
squandered until the system degenerated into the money, as it is deducted, paying today’s pension, with complete age
dependency, now unsustainable.
Now those in work today can no
longer afford to support the increasing number retired, even at the poverty
levels now prevailing, with desperate measures being taken to prop up the
system, making people work longer, means testing for basics, grabbing personal
assets with envious eyes on those who have made provision for themselves, with
extra pension contributions in personal schemes and creating envy.
Total National Insurance
contributions for someone on the average wage of £500 per week amount to 20% of
wages, the same as the basic tax rate; 80% of this money is spent on State
pensions. If this 16%, some £80 per week were put into a well managed funded
pension scheme it could after 40 years of work and saving yield a pension of
some £250 to £320 per week, three times the current State basic pension.
The State has thrown away these
advantages of prudent money management with the accumulation and growth of
funds, it has also lost sight of the fact that contributions are individual
personal savings to be respected and nurtured. In fact the current approach
would be treated as an illegal act of fraud.
To be continued
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