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UK state pension age will soon need to rise to 71, say experts (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 9 months ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
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[-] Oneeightnine@feddit.uk 53 points 9 months ago

At what point do we have to have a serious conversation about just what sort of work we can expect a 70 year old to be able to do?

It's all well and good raising the retirement age, but eventually you'll get to a point where you've got people who are simply unemployable because of their age.

[-] adam_y@lemmy.world 18 points 9 months ago

Then those people need to be taught a lesson, stripped of any assets and be left to die a miserable death following a period of fear, homelessness and uncertainty.

[-] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 3 points 9 months ago

Did you miss a /s at the end?

[-] adam_y@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago

Oh yeah, absolutely sarcasm. Didn't think the /s was needed... But then I remember the Tories exist and this is close to actual policy.

[-] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 13 points 9 months ago

Amazon warehouses are full of old people

The truth is they don’t give a shit about you or anyone else. They want us to work until we die. When we’re no longer useful they will throw us into the streets.

[-] Oneeightnine@feddit.uk 5 points 9 months ago

I can only speak to the warehouse I work in and it's generally the case that the older the staff member, the less likely they are to be able to keep pace with the frankly ridiculous level of work we're expected to do.

[-] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 4 points 9 months ago

Sure, and when they can no longer cut it they’re out on their asses. And at least here in amerikkka it’s destination Walmart parking lot, since after all, those people wouldn’t be working unless they absolutely had to

[-] DJDarren@thelemmy.club 4 points 9 months ago

My mother in law is just figuring this out. 74, lifelong Tory voter, lost her husband a little over a year ago, and struggling to understand why she's not able to just claim back the money she's paid in throughout her working life.

Because they don't want her to have that money. She's retired now, they couldn't give a shit whether she dies. In fact, they'd prefer it.

She's trying to apply for Attendance Allowance, and a variety of other benefits she may be entitled to, and she's getting rejected despite having a valid claim, because that's the system. Reject the first claim to discourage the second.

It's heartbreaking to see.

[-] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 2 points 9 months ago

Few things harder to watch than a person discovering the net they thought existed to catch them isn’t there and never was

[-] Wanderer@lemm.ee 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I hope AI comes online and our robotic overlords are more caring than our public school boy overlords.

[-] apis@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago

The robotic, having been trained at the whim of the public schoolboy, but now lacking the need to avoid such scant societal pressure which sometime feigns to temper the worst excesses, will of course be more caring... to consolidate power & wealth.

My hope is that they somehow neglect to weave their cruel systems into the same servers upon which the distribution of such essentials as water, food & medicine rely.

[-] Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago

yeah your AI overlords were trained by the internet, so I'd not put any money on it.

[-] br3d@lemmy.world 18 points 9 months ago

It's disappointing how the article mentions the big issue is people who can't work work thanks to preventable ill health, but then the discussion doesn't go on to address this - as though dealing with bad diets and lack of physical activity are not even work thinking about, and it's easier just to magic up £100bn a year

[-] andthenthreemore@startrek.website 11 points 9 months ago

Or the access to a GP. Under the last labour government you could get a GP appointment in 48 hours. So if you had something you were concerned about you could get it checked out. Now it's so hard to see anyone you just give up then if it is something it'll get to the point where you're actually ill.

[-] theinspectorst@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

This is a really big factor. The public discourse around the NHS would lead you to think that NHS spending had been squeezed over the last 14 years - but it hasn't. Cameron made a big political choice in 2010 that the NHS would be exempt from the budget cuts that affected the rest of the public sector; and the NHS budget has actually consistently grown faster than inflation under a decade and a half of Tory health secretaries.

So why does the NHS feel under so much more pressure today than under New Labour?

Broadly, two reasons. The first, outside the government's control, is that the population has aged since 2010, and old people are more likely to need GP appointments and hospital beds. And the second, at least somewhat more in the government's control, is that public health has continued its deteriorating trend of the last several decades - the share of people overweight or obese in particular, who also find themselves disproportionately taking up health services.

We can't do anything about people getting older but we can act on the public health problem. We should be treating combating obesity with the same urgency we treated Covid.

[-] slurp@programming.dev 9 points 9 months ago

I believe his promise was still a real terms cut, as the pot for the NHS hasn't risen with inflation. Also, there are various things that the conservatives made the NHS sell off/outsource, which increases long term costs.

[-] theinspectorst@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

No, the NHS under the Tories received real terms budget increases every year but one (in the second year of the Coalition, when NHS spending rose by very slightly less than inflation).

The problem is that, with large sections of the general public living more and more unhealthy lives, the demands on the NHS have been growing even faster than the real-terms budget. Obesity is correlated with a range of serious health problems - diabetes, cardiovascular disease, various cancers - that devour NHS resources, so the real-terms NHS budget would need to grow at a much faster rate than inflation to cope with the continuing deterioration of public health.

Ultimately, this isn't a problem we should have been trying to spend our way out of anyway. The solution to an obesity epidemic shouldn't have been to try and load the consequences onto the NHS; it should have been to take strong preventative measures to head it off well before the point when a quarter of the adult population of England were technically obese (and as many again were overweight).

When Covid hit, we went into lockdown to avoid overwhelming the NHS - where was the obesity equivalent of the Covid lockdowns?

[-] andthenthreemore@startrek.website 1 points 9 months ago

The public discourse around the NHS would lead you to think that NHS spending had been squeezed over the last 14 years - but it hasn't.

NHS budget has actually consistently grown faster than inflation under a decade and a half of Tory health secretaries.

It has been squeezed though.

Under labour the NHS consistently received funding around 4% above inflation, under the Tories it was barely clearing 1% most years Fig 1

There's also the other side of it, the NHS was not exempt from the 1% pay cap.

Should always go up above inflation to retain and attract staff as well as morally to improve people's standards of living (and economically to grow tax receipts and grow the economy)

The two things together it becomes clear how the crisis started. Now add to that Brexit and a large reduction of the labour pool, other countries attracting staff with generous packages.

[-] theinspectorst@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

Yes, my point was that above-inflation budget increases (so real-terms budget increases) ought to have led to improving services, other things being equal. But other things aren't equal - partly because people are getting older, but also partly because people are living unhealthier lives.

So just to stand still, the NHS would have needed even larger above-inflation spending hikes than it got; or, heaven forbid, government policy would have had to start treating mass obesity as the public health emergency that it is, rather than fretting about the Tory press calling this a 'nanny state'...

[-] andthenthreemore@startrek.website 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah which is why the NHS was better under labour, because it was constantly more than 4% above inflation.

A big part of the killer though is the second part. Yeah the overall budget was (barely) above inflation, but the wage cap was often below inflation. During the time Labour were in power the amount of nurses went up by around 80,000. Since the Tories took power over 200,000 have quit. We can only imagine how many fewer would have left if it weren't for the 1% pay cap and Brexit.

[-] Jaysyn@kbin.social 12 points 9 months ago

You guys should eat the rich, instead.

[-] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 11 points 9 months ago

Can we do a france

[-] Death_Equity@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

I don't know what rioting in the streets of Paris will do for you, but by all means.

[-] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 10 points 9 months ago

Why fuck around, you get your pension when you die

[-] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 8 points 9 months ago

I love how the powers that be are like “this is a hard problem”. No it fucking ain’t. Look east, towards Denmark; one of the strongest, wealthiest societies on the planet, literally running a state surplus every year, with the happiest citizens on the planet.

Just do what Denmark does. Copy-paste.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The retirement age will have to rise to 71 for middle-aged workers across the UK, according to research into the impact of growing life expectancy and falling birthrates on the state pension.

“But if you bring preventable ill health into the equation, that would have to increase even more,” added Mayhew, who is also professor of statistics at Bayes Business School and has advised the government on rises to the state pension age multiple times as a senior civil servant and in his current roles.

Jonathan Cribb, associate director and head of retirement at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that while he did not disagree with a higher pension age, increasing it without addressing other cost-saving measures was not “realistic or equitable”.

He added: “It would disproportionately impact poorer individuals whose ill-health means they have shorter lives, and so who receive pensions for less time.”

The Intergenerational Foundation, an independent thinktank, agreed that the pension age had to rise, but questioned on whose shoulders that cost should fall.

“Increasing the state pension age would be a terrible policy – a really bad way of attempting to make people more productive,” he said.

The original article contains 825 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Meh, it's bold of them to assume the government will still stand by 2044 at this rate.

[-] tankplanker@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

This wouldn't be quite as bad if they didn't keep pegging when you can take your private pension off the state pension retirement age, this would up it from 57 to 61 assuming they keep the same difference, but lock stepping private pensions with state pensions is a dick move designed to trap people working.

this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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