Happy Christmas all you pensioners

Brilliant!

Likewise!

Happy Christmas all.

Without the ads

I know, even ITV dramas are spared.

The time limit for applying for Pension Credit (and therefore the Winter Fuel Allowance) is midnight tonite (Saturday 21st Dec 2024).

But it seems 100,000s aren't going to claim pension credit - why?!

Apparently stigma is an issue, accepting handouts, effectively begging. This comes across in some late night phone-ins I've been listening to. But isn't accepting the winter fuel payment much the same as claiming pension credit?

My best guess is a fear/reluctance to engage with the form filling and vetting that goes with means testing.

you could never reject it. It just arrives.

take a look at the form. Its over 20 pages long and asks about all sorts of peculiar thing. I am sure there is at least one "catch 22" type question in there.....

Dave

It never was until now.

Before Labour got in and started their targeting of pensioners for a punishment beating for predominantly voting Conservative, the WFA was a part and parcel of the ordinary state pension, earned by having paid in National Insurance for a number of years (though the WFA was the same amount even if the recipient had not contributed enough for a full pension).

But now, the WFA has been abolished and only reinstated as part of Pension Credit.

Even so, anyone who is objectively entitled to Pension Credit is poor on anyone's definition.

There can, of course, be more than one reason for that.

Utter nonsense. Gordon Brown introduced the WFA in 1997 in order to buy votes, under the guise of keeping pensioners 'warm' in winter. It is paid for by current working taxpayers (or in reality simply by adding to the national debt which future taxpayers are on the hook for).

It was never any part of the state pension which itself is a classic benefit because someone who earns £166/week for 35 years pays ZERO NI yet gets NI credits and is 'entitled' to the full state pension. Someone earning £1 million/week for 35 years pays a stonking amount of NI and tax (and his/her employer) yet this person is entitled to the same state pension (and WFA) as the person on £166/week.

QED It's a benefit, but try explaining that to all those people who commented on the recent DT article about those 52% of people who are getting more in benefits than they pay in tax and NI - rising to 83% ? of pensioners.

Cue much raging and frothing

Are you really trying to deny that pensioners get the state pension (neé Retirement Pension) only because they have either paid or been credited with decades of National Insurance contributions?

Really?

And the WFA was a part of that. Yes, it was added only during the late nineties, but that does not make it any less a component of the State Pension.

:-) I get a reduced pension due to being *opted out* as self employed from the age of forty. The WFA was a nice Christmas present.

read what I posted, ffs.

NO IT WASN'T. It is NO part of the state pension, and never existed prior to 1997. Since 1997 pensioners have done far better than people on low/minimum wages. It is no longer needed for the vast majority of them.

The triple lock more than compensates for the so-called 'loss' of the WFA anyway.

No it does not. The triple lock compensates for inflation, comparison with wage increases or 2.5%, whichever is higher. It does not compensate for the loss of the WFA at all. UK pensions are pitifully low and the triple lock was designed to gradually bring them up to a reasonable level - except that the rate of increase is expected to do so only after

Kier Starmer has recently claimed in Parliament that *EVERY* pensioner will be receiving an increase of £472 per year, but this is an outright lie. Any pensioner on the pre-2016 pension gets just £363 - which minus the WFA of £300, leaves an increase of just £63 ... dwarfed by the increases in the costs of shopping, council tax, fuel, and much more.

Every year, the pre-2016 pensions grow worse, as the basic pension increases by the triple-lock rate, but the SERPS top-up does not, while the already higher post-2016 pension increases by the full amount.

Isn't that the point of pension credit, though - it tops up income, as well as giving simple access to many other benefits?

As mentioned up-thread, getting people on to pension credit is a big issue - for almost a million pensioners. This is a decent summary of the situation, and suggests a way to sort it out (make income and tax data available to LAs):

Read my previous post !.

Someone earning £166/week for 48 weeks and then for 35 years will pay ZERO NI but will get 1 years NI credit per year and that entitles him/her to a free state pension worth £238,000 (m) or £268,000 (f).

I don't call that 'pitifully low', I call it wonderfully generous and on top of that is all-you-can-eat-for-FREE NHS treatment, which for every person over 85 is worth an average of another £30,000 per year. No other country provides this, and for a good economic reason, it is impossible without destroying the economy with unsustainable taxes or debt or both.

Many EU countries pay higher pensions because the recipients and their employers have paid in far higher levels of social taxes than have been levied in the UK since 1947. In most if not all these countries there are additional charges that UK residents have become used to getting for free. The only other country that is similar to the UK is Ireland and they too have massive debt problems caused by an ageing and unhealthy population.

"There are nearly 12 million (11,989,322) people aged 65 and above in the UK of which: o 5.4 million people are aged 75+, o 1.6 million are aged 85+, o Over 500,000 people are 90+ (579,776) o 14,430 are centenarians (ONS, 2018f, 2018e)."

Presumably you've seen the House of Commons report in October this year called "Pensions: International comparisons"?

Contributions have been made to these various systems during working years in the form of taxes (and N.I. in the UK). Although it doesn't really matter which, because the government does not operate a pot of money for pensions.

Those on the full old pension do not get pension credit.