From an article by Dave Nellist recently published by ‘Coventry Advertiser’. The Advertiser is available free from garages and supermarkets throughout Coventry.
“One of the biggest debates around is 'at what age should the state pension be payable?”
A recent report by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) claims that Government plans to raise the pension age from 65 to 68 over the next 35 years do not go far enough. PwC say future governments will have to raise the pension age to 70, in order to help pay back some of the money borrowed over the last two years to save the banking system.
This is because the collapse in the economy, including the export of jobs and factories abroad, has caused a permanent hole of £73 billion in public finances. Raising the state retirement age, according to the PwC report, would save the government £9 billion a year towards plugging that hole.
I think the pension should be available as now - but that men and women who want to should be able to work beyond 65 without being forced into retirement. In fact, I've worked alongside many men and women in their 70s and 80s and valued the contribution they are still able to make.
But the Opposition think the Government is moving too slow. They want to bring forward by 10 years Labour's plans to raise the age at which the state pension could be claimed for men from 65 to 66 (and slightly later for women as well). When announcing the idea at Tory party conference George Osborne tried to give the impression that here was a sacrifice to help restore the market economy which would affect everyone equally - "we're all in this together", he said. But are we?
Life expectancy in Coventry has certainly improved over the last 20 years. At the beginning of the 1990s men, on average, lived to 72 and women to 78 - today it’s a couple of years longer for women, and 4 more years for men. But like all averages, those figures hide a wide variation.
In the north and eastern areas of Coventry life expectancy is significantly lower. In fact in the area I represent, St Michael's, the average age at which men die is only 65. Raising the state retirement age to 66 is saying to the 'average man' in St Michael's: "work until you drop". For working people with only little or no access to a good company pension, the state retirement pension is a wholly inadequate income, I believe it should be much higher - but it looks like whatever mix of MPs forms the next government state pension age is going to come under attack.”
