Property News · January 21, 2013

Letters: Tories' flat-rate pension plan will end in tiers


Before we all get carried away and congratulate Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories for their magnanimity (flat-rate pension of £144 per week from 2017) in introducing an increased state pension, let’s not forget that £144 is only £1.30 more that than the current (2013) means-tested pension of £142 with pension credit (Duncan Smith’s flat-rate state pension branded a con-trick, 14 January). Let’s also remember that the pension-credit element of £142.70 was introduced by New Labour because it didn’t reintroduce (as it promised to do) the link to average wages rather than prices for the annual uprating of the basic state pension.Furthermore, this magnificent £144 from 2017 is probably less than what the basic state pension would have been had not Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party made the abolition of this link, to average wage increases, one of the first things that they did in 1980, shortly after getting elected. We currently have, expressed as a percentage of a country’s median average wage/salary, the second-lowest state pension in the EU. This in the incorrectly labelled fourth (or fifth) richest country in the world and the (so-called) second richest in the EU. Let’s not also forget that when the basic state pension, in its current format, was introduced in 1978, the NI contribution rate was 6% of relevant earnings between the lower and upper earnings limit. It is now 12%.A SchröderUlverston, Cumbria Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Letters: Tories’ flat-rate pension plan will end in tiers

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