Almost nine million workers will be forced to wait longer for their state pension if the Government increases the retirement age to 68 in the mid-2030s.
The state pension age is presently set at 66 and is in the process of increasing to 67, and it’s legislated to increase again to 68 between 2044 and 2046, but ministers are considering plans to accelerate this by almost a decade.
According to estimates from the pension specialist Just Group, this will hit about 8.5 million workers approaching retirement, and it found that revving the increase in the state pension age would impact about 910,000 people each year.
While the state pension age is scheduled to increase in the 2044 to 2046 window, the Government wants this to happen by 2039, and industry experts have speculated that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt could announce an even earlier timetable, between 2034 and 2036, in the Budget next week.
Stephen Lowe, of Just Group, said that increasing the state pension age forces a radical shift in people’s retirement planning and that it means people will face a fundamental choice of financing an extra year before they receive their state pension, which is the bedrock of retirement income for many people or working longer.
Mr Lowe added that it was vital the government supports any change in the state pension age with a comprehensive and effective communications campaign and that they’ve seen in the recent past what serious difficulties it can cause people if they’re not aware of a change to their own state pension age.
A generation of women born in the 1950s was forced to wait an additional six years for their state pension after legislation was tweaked, giving rise to the Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaign.
According to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, said that in the past, increasing the state pension age had also exacerbated social inequality across the country. The last increase disproportionately affected senior workers in the most impoverished regions of Britain.
The IFS calculated that this was because they’re less likely to have adequate private savings and therefore have no option but to work for longer while they wait to receive the state pension and that when the state pension age increased from 65 to 66, one in seven 65-year-olds were pushed into income poverty as a consequence.
Meanwhile, we import hundreds of migrants and hand them instant NHS, schools and homes – oh, and then we establish them as a protected species, who if we don’t keep our mouths shut might offend them, but then how else are we going to pay for the £5 billion a year hotel bill for all those young men coming across the channel – yes, of course, with the pension money that we worked for and paid into a system that had no intention of allowing us to have, yet we worked mercilessly hard for that!
And where are all these 68-year-olds supposed to work? Ageism is already rampant, which affects people in their 50s, if not before.
Of course, they don’t have to work, but they’ll have no choice because they won’t be able to access their state pension – the Government are complete schmucks, there’s no doubt about that and if they had a whole brain cell between them they’d be dangerous.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 