Thursday 19 September 2019

Increasing The Pension Age

The UK had 6,584,661 pensioners between the ages of 65 and 74 but 3,812,058 above 75 which is a depressingly large drop but exactly why the Government are mulling over moving the retirement age to 75, less people to pay out the state pension to. 
When i started out working, women qualified for their state pension at 60 and then it got pushed up to 65 the same as men, then 68 and now they are considering adding another seven years of working life onto us all saving the Government billions.
An economic policy of paying in for a state pension all your working life and then working until you drop and no retirement for a good proportion of us has not gone down well and even other Conservatives have spoken out against it and the Government have been quick to row back that it was only an idea.
The UK already has the highest retirement age along with The Netherlands and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that the average life expectancy in England for a male is 79.5 years while women on average live for 83.2 years.
My father was a bricklayer and by the time he retired at 65 his knees were shot and years of being outside in the cold, rain and snow did his body no favours and would dose himself on painkillers to get through the day so to expect someone in a nice office job deciding that people who work in far tougher environments with massive wear and tear on their bodies, to keep at it until they are 75 is a much tougher ask.
Maybe the retirement age should go down as this frees up jobs for the upcoming generation who will be locked out of these jobs for a further half a decade if the retirement age is raised.
Each year later is a year more of us paying in and a year less of them paying out but more importantly it's a year off your twilight pensioner years when you should be going on cruises around Scandinavia or shopping for cardigans.
Seems the Government austerity drive has cut all it can cut and they are now looking for other ways to plug the gap that strangely seems to be still growing despite all the slashing and cutting everything in sight like madmen for the past nine years.
Seeing as my retirement pension pot means that i will be living on tins of beans and whatever i can find behind the fridge when i stop work, if i ever stop work, i had better start saving.

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

doesn't save the government anything - the government spends other peoples money. it saves tax payers billions.