Prime minister likely to face questions over winter fuel allowance as figures show state pension rising with earnings will lead to above-inflation increase
The Scottish government has put in “as much money as we can” to try to avoid strikes by council staff, Shona Robison, the finance secretary, has said.
Robison said, while it was “disappointing” that Unison, Scotland’s largest local government union, had voted against the latest pay deal, the issue was one for the council body Cosla to resolve. As PA Media reports, her comments came after Unison members voted by 86% to reject an offer which would have given staff either an hourly pay increase of 67p or a 3.6% salary rise, whichever is higher.
We have put as much money as we can into these envelopes, to try to avoid what is costly industrial action.
What is important now is that the employer, local government, continues to discuss with Unison to see if that costly industrial action can be avoided.
@Andrew The debate about the fuel allowance has been too simplistic. We need real data to understand it properly. For example, 80% of pensioners do not qualify for additional benefits – that isn’t a scandal – it’s because they earn enough not to. There are 8.5m who earned above the personal tax threshold so were taxed last year. This isn’t about taking money from the poor, it’s about redistributing money where it is needed!
On 25 November 1997, just months after the New Labour government was formed, Gordon Brown introduced the annual winter fuel payment for all pensioners. He was reflecting the concerns not just of 1990s Labour politicians but of anti-poverty campaigners too: the two great and equal evils to be alleviated were pensioner poverty and child poverty. The inequality surge of the 1980s had left both sky high: in 1990 almost 40 per cent of pensioners and over 30 per cent of children were in poverty. It was no country to grow up or grow old in.
Today, pensioner poverty levels have been halved to stand at 18 per cent. (In contrast, child poverty has stayed stubbornly high.) There are still too many poor pensioners, with increases in recent years, but this is a major improvement that British politics is still struggling to wake up to. For the first time in history, pensioners are now less likely to be in poverty than the rest of the population and, since 2010, the typical pensioner’s income is similar to or even higher than the typical non-pensioner’s. Policy has supported this trend, most recently with the triple lock on the state pension ensuring it rises in line with whichever is higher: inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent. But the trend also reflects that those in their sixties and seventies today are more likely to be doing some work, owning their own home and retiring on more generous private pensions than their predecessors. The retired have bucked the income stagnation trend with 24 per cent income growth between 2004/05 and 2021/22, in contrast with 11 per cent growth for the rest of the population.The good news is that economic outcomes for older age groups are far rosier than they used to be.
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