The government have angered even their own backbenchers by speeding ahead with controversial plans to raise the national retirement age. With the raising of pension age for women to 65 by 2018 and then again for both men and women to 66 by 2020, the government are ensuring that the poorest, who often work for their entire adult lifetime from age 16 in lower paid jobs, will see little return in retirement.
In 2008, the BBC claimed that in Easterhouse Glasgow, the average life expectancy is 66 years old and if you take for example NHS Scotland statistics from 2006, for a man living in Calton in Glasgow, the average life expectancy is 53.9 years old, women do fare better.
What chance would an ‘average’ person from one of these Glasgow areas have of enjoying retirement?
What chance would they have of actually reaching retirement?
And before someone makes the smart arsed remark that their entire life was spent in retirement on benefits, in Calton 63% of households have someone working, not high by any stretch of imagination but not the worst either. Easterhouse is worse with almost 50% of households workless.
So while someone living in affluent parts of South East England can expect an average life expectancy of 80years or more, or with the new suggested retirement age, an average of 14 years of state funded retirement, someone living in certain parts of Glasgow will be lucky to reach the new retirement age at all.
It’s all very well to use extended life expectancies as justification for making people work longer but as the statistics have shown, for some area’s of Glasgow, which in the 1980’s were realistically compared with 3rd world countries regarding poverty, average life expectancy is less than the new retirement age.
So the rising pension age suits those in the South of England far better than it does those in the South West of Scotland.
Doesn’t quite seem fair, does it?
GrumpyHatLady & Chums 