The Tories WILL cut pensioner benefits. It’s an inevitability as the figures prove – SPeye Joe
If the words of the Chancellor George Osborne are to be believed then the Tories WILL be cutting pensioner benefits after the next election. There is no doubt about this whatsoever, writes Joe Halewood on SPeye Joe.
1. What has Osborne said?
Osborne alarmed Duncan Smith and angered Clegg when he said on Monday that £25bn in spending reductions, due to be imposed between 2016-17 and 2017-18, would have to include £12bn in welfare cuts.
In order to achieve the £12 billion of stated cuts to the overall welfare benefit bill the Tories will have to make £32 billion of cuts – the stated £12 billion plus the additional minimum cost of £20 billion per year in Universal Credit.
Anyone care to tell me how the Tories will find at least £32 billion of cuts from the £54 billion working-age welfare benefit bill – a mere 60% cut to the current bill?
The Tories will have no alternative but to cut back on pensioner benefits. They will have to cut them.
The full article goes into the kind of detail you need if you’re going to be convinced, so please visit SPeye Joe and be convinced – especially if you are a pensioner who would be said to be under-occupying if the Bedroom Tax was applied to you.
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If they attack the pensioners, who will vote for them in future elections?
Personally I have never been in any doubt that the Nasty Party will slash pensioners’ benefits. If they had their way they would even stop the basic State Pension. These loathsome people are hell bent on taking the country back to the 18th/19th centuries.
Pensioners are already hit by the Bedroom Tax, because of of the raised retirement age especially for women from 2013 raised from 60 to 66.
Once a one of a pensioner in a shared home with other family passes away, then under occupancy hits.
The Daily Mirror says a further million will be hit by the Bedroom Tax.
But then UKIP also offer the aboliton of the Bedroom Tax. So that is not unique to Labour.
Pension credit (savings) is already in law to be abolished in 2016.
In 2016 guarantee credit part of Pension Credit will be drastically cut as current pensioners get hit by complex conditionality and form filling for it. And lose it when go into care.
The raised retirement age for women took away half a decade of Winter Fuel Allowance for the wife into the household budget, and a year from the husband (and rising).
Loss of benefits lose the couple Cold Weather Payments.
A lot of benefits end after age 64.
There are 1 million people aged 60-64 only on some kind of welfare (Source DWP).
The state pension is portrayed as a benefit because the Tories intend to cut its rises and its amount even to current pensioners. Copying what the Troika has got away with in Europe, ignored by EU government.
The current state pension is already the lowest of all rich nations bar poor Mexico.
In 2016 someone turning 80 loses the small Category D top up to a pro rata tiny state pension.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
Then in 2016 nil state penson for less than 10 years National Insurance credits / contribution history raises from the current 1 year NI history.
This will hit women the most, but just as much the poorest workers men and women with no NI credit history because of the salary sacrifice scheme and / or being too low waged to be in the NI system at all.
See why under my petition, in my WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT section, at:
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
Some people are already getting flat rate state pension forecasts for their retirement age next year as low as £55 per week with no top ups (at the moment it is £113.10 per week).
Mr Steve Webb Lib Dem Pensions Minister just could not bring himself to tell me in n official letter last month that I will never get any state pension, even if I could live on fresh air til 2020.
I suspect the Tories have mortgaged our ringfenced National Insurance Fund. I’m seriously concerned that an incoming Labour administration will find our state pension money has disappeared.