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Divorced Women 'Face Poverty at 65'

By John Carvel, The Guardian

January 30, 2004

The shocking financial plight of divorced women at retirement age was exposed by the Office for National Statistics yesterday in its annual report on social trends. 

It said 40% of divorced women over 65 were poor enough to qualify for income support from the state, compared with 1% of married women and 23% of divorced men in the same age group. 

The figures appeared to explode perceptions based on the experience of celebrity divorcees living in style after taking husbands to the cleaners in the divorce courts. 

The ONS figures showed average earnings of divorced women over 65 in Britain were £92 a week in 2001/2, compared with £112 for widows and £227 for married couples. 

The reason so many older divorced women are poor is that most spent time caring for children and returned to work too late to build up entitlement to a substantial occupational pension. This left them worse off on retirement than single women. 

Few gained any share in their husband's pension as part of a divorce settlement. This also left them worse off than married or widowed women. 
Jay Ginn, co-author of the report, said: "Divorced women who have had children are at the bottom of the pile." 

Divorced women used to rely on the basic state pension, but the value of this was being eroded from 15% of average earnings to a projected 7% by 2050, forcing more to rely on income support. As their financial position deteriorates, their numbers will increase from about 250,000 in 2001 to at least 750,000 in 2021. 

Ms Ginn said few women were benefiting from pension-sharing orders in divorce settlements. Since December 2000 only 1,300 such orders have been given by the courts out of about 300,000 divorces. 

Her report - published as the leading article in Social Trends - included criticism of government pensions policy that was unusually strong for a government publication. 

Ministers want to target extra spending on the poorest pensioners through income support, but Ms Ginn and her co-author Sara Arber said: "Claiming means-tested benefits is considered by many to signify shameful dependency. Yet many British pensioners, especially women, need income support mainly because the basic state pension provides an increasingly inadequate income and they were unable to obtain a good state second pension or private pension due to their caring roles." 

Officials threatened to eject journalists from a press conference yesterday if they persisted in asking Ms Ginn for her view of these arrangements. 

Speaking in a personal capacity as an academic from the center for research on ageing and gender at Surrey University, she said the government should target help to poor pensioners by raising the basic state pension and clawing back from richer pensioners through income tax. 

"The redistributive power of the basic state pension is being undermined and the government is encouraging people to move to private pensions which are unequally available ... things are getting worse for divorced women. Their lack of a private pension is becoming more and more important." 

Only a third of divorced women had any private pension. 
The report showed an increasing gap between the richest and poorest pensioners. The earnings of those in the top fifth of income brackets have increased by 80% since 1979, while those in the poorest fifth have gone up by 34%. 


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