Pensioners in poverty deserve better from the Government - Yorkshire Post Letters

NOT once did the Chancellor utter the word ‘pensioner’ in his Budget, so Ros Altmann (The Yorkshire Post, November 10) rightly berates the current Government and Rishi Sunak in particular for their laissez-faire attitude towards pensioners.

She highlights in her latest analysis the general belief that pensioners are thought to be well off. Rightly she states that over two million pensioners are in poverty, and that UK state pensions are the ‘lowest in the developed world’ but she misses a vital point.

Most of those pensioners who are in poverty will be getting a basic pension and thus will be eligible for many more benefits, whilst those with only a modicum of an ‘earnings related or private’ pension could be even worse off than them.

These pensioners will not get a council tax reduction of 100 per cent, a free TV licence if over 75, warm home allowance, teeth, spectacles, cold weather payments and even mortgage interest payments. And if they are disabled there are benefits which they also will not be entitled to.

As Ros ultimately says ‘Pensioners deserve better’.

If the OAPs with additional small pensions realise that they are being inexorably squeezed and told that they have to tighten their belts by a mealy-mouthed Chancellor and his cohorts in the Department of Work and Pensions, they may very soon abandon their previous party alliances and purely vote (okay, a bit selfishly but what the hell?) for whichever side will give them the best deal in their not so golden years…and who would blame them?

Meanwhile I have to ask why we continually elect MPs who have no ‘work experience’ as such and bring nothing particularly useful to the party (Tom Richmond, The Yorkshire Post, November 13).

How come someone with a degree in history becomes the Business Secretary for instance?

How come an MP with experience of the Armed Forces (and there have been a few) very rarely gets to be that Minister?

From: Neil Richardson, Kirkheaton.

WITH today’s pensioners receiving the lowest state pension in the developed world, and more than two million of them near the poverty line, what kind of living standards have been predicted for 2031, when the Government’s expensive lust to electrify 99 per cent of Britain’s infrastructure will be 10 more years down the road to economic Armageddon?