It needs to be graduated, ie more for those in desperate need and less for those who are borderline. I've always thought that the fixed winter fuel payment was a daft idea. Instead of this we should be investing more heavily in cheap home-made renewable energy thus not being forced to pay questionable regimes (Russia) and destructive companies (PB etc) for their environmentally catastrophic products.
Literally millions They won’t. Not all. I’ve spoken to one today, a friend’s dad. He has state pension, a very generous police pension, two properties, various assets / shares and not far off a million in savings. He thinks it’s a disgrace as ‘I paid into the system all my life’. He was retired by South Yorkshire Police at the age of 45… and is the king of tax avoiders. He’s currently trying to get PIP, and carers allowance for his Mrs, as ‘I’m over seventy now and have aches and pains. More than most of the ******** on it have. I’ll get it, you watch’. Sadly he’s not unique. Thankfully there are others like you.
They have proper screwed up here in my opinion. We all know that the whole election campaign was dishonest because there are tax rises coming that they refused to mention. But they tied their hands by saying that they would not increase income tax, NI or VAT even though NI has only just been reduced and no-one would have had much of an argument if they said they would just put it back to where it was at the start of the year. Instead, they are now leaving that where it is and making some seriously bad choices instead to find some money. I despair of the country ever having the backbone to have the difficult conversations needed to fix the care system. This is a bad start.
From Age Uk May 2024 800,000 pensioner households in Great Britain are entitled to, but not receiving, Pension Credit - that means more than a third (37%) of those who are eligible for this vital support are missing out. • 310,000 pensioner households are missing out on help with rent through Housing Benefit – just over a fifth (21%) of those who are eligible to claim. • In a single year £2.8 billion of Pension Credit and Housing Benefit go unclaimed by older people.
He's in a minority, most people have a sense of fairness which the bloke you talk about clearly hasn't. He probably doesn't realise how lucky he is to be part of the luckiest generation in British history, I do.
So if the people who worked all their life and paid national insurance and paid into a private pension had refused to do this who would look after all those who decided work wasn’t for them.
What has she said about a cap . There needs to be a cap . Nobody should lose their home to pay for care
It’s scrapped , I think it was going to be a maximum of £85k on social care costs , if you have savings of over 24k you pay full whack for care , even if you do qualify for Local Authority assistance most care homes require a third party top ( usually from relatives)
But if you've got now't the state will pay for it. If you've worked all your life and saved money you have to pay for it. They'll be means testing the state pension next this lot.
Strange how the magic money machine has somehow been able to pay the junior doctors a 22% pay rise over the next 2 years not to mention 5.5% for teachers etc. Bet they don't vote Labour by any chance.
People should be able to remain in their homes but give up equity to pay for care. Either that or massively raise inheritance tax.
Or, here's an idea. Have a grown up conversation with the country that social care is expensive, and if we want a system that works, then we need to pay for it. The way our political system works, all decisions being for the short term with one eye on the opinion polls, we never make long term decisions.
I have just looked up the eligibility criteria for pension credit. For a single person, it tops up their income to £218.15 a week. Or £11344 a year. If you have over 10k in savings, every £500 above that counts as £1 income for the above calculation. So someone with 20k savings gets nothing if their income is £198 a week. So according to this government, someone with an income of just over 11 grand doesn't need the extra help. We'll I'm sorry, I don't agree. The threshold line needs to be drawn somewhere, fair enough. But 11k? - that is not the definition of a well off pensioner. This decision, by a Labour government, will mean many more people choosing whether to eat or heat this winter. I don't know how they defend that when, but for political expediency, they could have just cancelled the NI reduction and everyone would have barely noticed.