Thursday, June 14, 2012

Working on

The new reality for a lot of folks is that they are going to have to carry on working once they've passed their retirement age either through choice or simply because they cannot afford to retire, particularly on a state pension. Well according to various headlines today anyway, though most seem to miss a very obvious omission in the people who will have to carry on working.
Express.
BRITAIN’S economic crisis has almost doubled the number of pensioners forced to work in their retirement as they struggle to cope with the rising cost of living.
Pensioners are driving taxis, cleaning houses and even taking care of the elderly in a bid to pay their bills.
As many as 1.4 million ­people were working beyond 65 last year – up from around 800,000 in 2000, ­official figures showed.
A high proportion of men had stayed on in “higher skilled” executive jobs – such as sales directors or chief executives, the Office for National Statistics found.
Vince Smith-Hughes, a retirement expert at Prudential, described the research as reflecting a “new retirement reality” which will see people having to work for even longer.
“More than 10 per cent of people who had planned to retire this year are making alternative arrangements and putting off drawing their pensions for the time being,” he said. “The retirement landscape is changing and as a result retiring at 65 is no longer a given for the vast majority of people.”
Retiring at 65 will soon be a thing of the past anyway, the government intends to raise the retirement age to 67 by 2028, though why they're waiting so long is a bit of a mystery. But the hidden omission in all this talk is that whatever the retirement age is for the private sector or getting your hands on a state pension, the same rules don't apply to the public sector who are hell bent on keeping their gold plated index linked pensions and retiring at an age that those who work in the private sector can only dream of (whilst paying taxes to pay for the public sectors largesse in its pension scheme) Indeed if the state hadn't run up such a massive public debt (thank you Labour and thank you Tories for continuing the madness) we wouldn't be in this position now, there would just about be enough money in the pot to keep our pensioners in a degree of comfort. That coupled with the politicians lunacy in demanding 'green' energy coupled with expensive fuel bills means that many of us will never ever be able to afford to retire unless we get lucky on the lottery.
This sadly is the legacy of massive government, idiotic left wing policies, socialist leaning unions and a lack of duty of care to a vulnerable section of our society.
Work, starve or freeze in the winters that we were no longer supposed to have.

3 annotations:

Anonymous said...

Of course the way the markets are at the moment, and the fact that the dribbling idiot Cyclops Brown made UK pensions among the worst in the developed world, people would be daft to take their pension at the moment.

Of course it may not get better; it may even get worse, but when I started saving for a pension I was told that I'd need £100,000 in my pot for a £16,000 a year pension.

Now you would need around £300,000 to get that. And most people like me will never be able to save £300,000 without living on bread and water and sleeping on the beach. So we will have around £2,000 pensions and have to get state help when we are too old to work. Brilliant.

The fact that older people stay in work does, of course, limit the number of jobs for young people, increasing the dreaded youth unemployment situation, about which the government appears to have done nothing but fiddle figures, and hand vast amounts of tax pounds to crooked companies that invent their results.

On every occasion when a report has shown that jobcentre staff get better results (and god knows they are hopeless) the work is taken from JC+ and given to the private companies, which sit back and do sod all, and claim big sums.

And the UK governments of both types do nothing... except give them more contracts.

I expect we shall find in the future ex cabinet secretaries having seats on their boards, a little like that Hewett female who was English Health Secretary, started dismantle your health service, and got herself set up for half a dozen or so directorships when she was booted out of office for being a useless cow (to be replaced by the arrogant b*****d Lansley, who is doing exactly the same thing, only faster.

Tarka the Rotter said...

It's time we, the people, held Brown personally to account for his raid on pensions...time for legal action

James Higham said...

Big troubles coming, QM, big troubles.