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Call to Scrap Means-Tested Benefits in North

Irish Examiner

United Kingdom

October 11, 2005

The British government was today urged to scrap means-tested benefits for senior citizens in the North and instead offer them £110 (€160.20) a week under a simpler universal citizen’s pension.

Ulster Unionist Assembly member Billy Bell said means testing was embarrassing for old people and reduced to a minimum in the welfare and benefits system.

“It is demeaning for old people, deeply invasive of their personal privacy and intensely humiliating,” the Lagan Valley MLA argued.

“We want to see 10 million people across the UK lifted out of current means tested benefits and paid a decent universal pension, probably set somewhere in the region of £110 (€160.20) a week.

“We want a system which will be fairer to millions of women and to carers who often end up receiving lower pensions under the current system because of periods they had spent not working either because they took time off work to bring up a family or to look after elderly, ill or disabled relatives.

“We also want a system which is simpler and less complicated to administer.

“The savings which could be made by cutting back on the pensions bureaucracy, which has become virtually a state within a state, could be ploughed back into pensions. A simpler scheme would require fewer bureaucrats to administer it.” 

Currently a single person can expect to receive a weekly pension of £82.05 (€119.40) a week and a couple £132.20 (€192.40) a week if they satisfied the criteria of national insurance payments.

Mr Bell said today if a citizen’s pension were introduced in 2010 along the line his party was proposing, it would cost no more than the current state pension system if the money for the basic state pension, the state second pension, including contracting out rebates, and the pensions credit, was used in the pool of money to support the £110 (€160.20)-a-week payment.

“The principle of a simple, adequate, first-tier state pension, which was available to all citizens, has increasingly become the consensus view among opinion formers in the pensions and political arenas,” he said.

“Down the line, the principle of a universal pension could be financially sustained by raising the retirement age, in line with increased life expectancy, initially to 67 in 2030 and to 69 in 2040.

“We need a new pensions deal, anchored in the dignity of the pensioner and in the common sense of simple universal structures.

“We must get some order imposed on the current morass of over-complicated regulation. 

"Pensioners must be guaranteed certainty in their old age.”


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