I could write a book on the people behind this campaign.
They are incredibly opportunistic.
And looking at the ombudsman report, over 90% of the target demographic was reached via the public campaign, which is a very high figure.
Basically, they want free money because “reasons”.
They wanted that benefit paid to every woman from 60 to 65
That bill was £58 Billion pounds.
The utter chutzpah of these folks is amazing because they call themselves for pension age inequality but they want to be paid for direct gender discrimination (men at the time retired at 65 vs 60 for women).
Their name should be for pension age discrimination as that is far more reflective of their aims.
This is one of the things that has gone very wrong in the UK. There is a huge culture of I have a grievance and the taxpayer should subsidise me
Another one is the miners who agreed to be bailed out because of the failure of their DB scheme. The Govt guaranteed their benefits but they negotiated to retain 50% of the surplus of the scheme over time.
What happened?
Again, now that the scheme has gone from deficit to a £2bn surplus, the miners are aggrieved and want more money.
The UK Govt just gave them all a £2bn windfall.
The whole thing is simply absurd. The public finances are in a horrible state and you simply cannot afford to spaff £2bn on these sort of gimmicks.
For this compensation are they looking at the pension payments they didn’t receive until they got to age 65?
In the same article the govt refers to a survey in 2006 that indicates that over 90% of the women were aware of the change. It also indicates that a letter was sent but not as early as the complainants wanted but less than 1 in 4 remembered the letter.
Just need the rich to pay their “fair share” according to US liberals.
It’s more likely that it is driven by economic pressures. The UK ain’t doing so well and they don’t have a solution.
Their original complaint wanted the full pension pay from 60 to 65. That was £58bn.
They took this all the way to the High Court, which shut them down. They then took this to Parliament directly, in order to get around the court decision.
And at that point the ombudsman came up with their report about the low severity and smaller possible payouts. That would have cost about £10bn.
And there are three huge public payouts already happening.
Post Office Scandal £1bn+
Tainted Blood scandal £10bn+
Miner Pensions £2bn+
The chance of them getting any money was basically zero. But I don’t expect them to stop as they really have little else to do (think older retired NIMBY boomers)
So I read up on the miners pension fund and I still don’t understand what happened. They seem to be communicating it as a release of some reserve fund maybe the investment reserve. That looks like it was in the range of 20% of the schemes assets at the valuation done in 2021 based on the GAD summary in the annual report at 2023. Is this release of the reserve to the fund assets what they are celebrating?
Also I don’t understand what the govt did here because it seems to me there was a price paid by the fund for the pension increase to be guaranteed at inflation that is now being treated as if the fund was robbed and is being returned because the fund is in a surplus and the guarantee never bit. It sounds like returning premiums because the insured event didn’t happen.
It’s like the politicians are politicking.
ETA: if the guarantee doesn’t end now then it may bite in the future and they are silent on whether or not the guarantee is ending.
The payouts (linked to inflation) were guaranteed by the Govt (in itself also an expensive agreement)
But any investment surplus above the contracted benefits went 50% to the Govt. The rest could be disbursed to the miners to top up their payouts.
That 50% surplus grew to about £2bn and sat as a Govt reserve fund (taxpayer money but also there in case the assets backing the index-linked scheme could not meet its obligations).
And Labour decided to give this all away.
They tried to hide it but the information got out due to a FOIA request.
And now the taxpayer is on the hook if investments come in under the expected payouts, as there is no reserve anymore.
The whole thing is insane.
AHH, so they kept this reserve outside the scheme as a risk fund as I would expect any GAD actuary to recommend so that any cost would hit that fund first. The scheme has a Guarantor reserve as first line protection and I think that’s what is making people crazy here.
It’s insane stuff.
Latest ONS Data is out now. From 2023.
53% of adults in the UK are net tax recipients.
45% of working people are net recipients.
85% of pensioners are net recipients.
And people wonder why the UK is destabilising?
Until that 53% number gets to sub 45% there is little hope for economic growth, as most revenue will be eaten up by the old and unproductive. The narrow slice of taxpayers that pay for it all are already changing their economic behaviors at the margins due to the very high tax rates that they are facing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/12/19/more-than-half-of-britain-receives-more-in-benefits/
So instead of 47% takers you have 47% givers?
I was curious… I couldn’t find anything analogous and recent for the US, but I did find this: Accounting for What Families Pay in Taxes and What They Receive in Government Spending , which suggests that in 2010, 60% of all families in the US received more in government benefits than they paid in taxes.
I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if differences in basis (“families” vs “adults”), or weirdness in considering NHS vs private health insurance, or pensions vs Social Security, complicate the comparison.
So Labour is is buying votes with taxpayer money. Isn’t that SOP for British govt. these days?
Sure. But at this point, the country cannot afford that kind of largesse anymore as it is in a stagflationary environment, which was caused by too many financial bungs for the old and unproductive over the last 30 years. Instead of investing into productive capital infrastructure, they gave more revenues away for the consumption of their respective tribes. The cummulative effect has been significant.
Its the end of the line basically. The public finances have been severely damaged by demographic decline and debt service costs (pandemic related) so you can’t kick the proverbial can down the road anymore.
So what you’re saying is they are almost out of other people’s money to spend.
Seems I’ve heard that someplace before.
They’ve been heavily criticised for means testing a universal pensioner benefit whereas the Tories cointroduced the triple lock pension. Not sure why you single out the party that’s been in power a handful of months rather than the one in power the last 14 years.
They didn’t look at individual families, just assumed everyone in one decile was the same.
And, they appear to have allocated 100% of government spending – " upper-income families tend to benefit most from national defense (a benefit assumed here to be proportionate to their income),"
Given that, 60% isn’t at all surprising. I might have expected more given our extremes in income distribution.
I googled this a bit more because it just was really fantastic that the Tories had discipline not to spend money they had.
They are releasing the investment reserve that was held in the scheme.
Productivity != income