The Freedom Pass is funded largely by the London Councils consortium. Lewisham pay for pensioners here. TfL fund the pass for the morning peak and overnight. (This is why the pass is only valid on TfL travel modes during the morning peak).
Outside London, pensioner bus passes are only valid between 0930 and 2300 weekdays and all day weekends and bank holidays, so Londoners get a lot more from it than those outside the capital, even with the cuts with the addition of using rail services.
(TfL fully fund the 60+ pass, given to London residents who are under pensionable age).
Somebody better tell her that someone faked her manifesto and posted it through people’s letterboxes. Would be interested in seeing a copy of the real one if you have it (from both previous elections)
Strongly disagree.
And frankly most of us who HAVE to still work at 60 and beyond do so because we are in lower paid jobs without the luxury of good pension pots and the option to retire at 60 and cash in.
My expenses are much the same as they always were tbh.
My oyster card was £1500 a year a hefty chunk out of my wages-in effect I work one hour of my 9 hour day just to cover my travel expenses .
Living in London is arguably more expensive in terms of rent and other costs for us over 60’s than if we lived in other towns so the free travel was a real help.
All the issues your describe affect under 60’s too.
If not more given huge rises in London rents and house prices in the last 20 years.
Also anyone under 40 like me won’t retire until 69 at the earliest, as for pension pots for our generation final salary pension pots are a mere folk memory.
The 60+ Oystercard is a great help. A Boris Johnson replacement for the Freedom Pass that Ken Livingston cancelled. If I had known at 40 that I would not be getting my promised state pension at 60 but have to wait until I was 66 for it, I might have at least been able to prepare, as you are lucky enough to be able to do. As it was I was 58 when I found I would not be getting the pension I had paid for all my working life. like the majority of my generation I started work at 16. I will have been paying National Insurance for 50 years when I finally qualify for a state pension at age 66. Trying to get work as a 64 year old is not easy believe me. And for those in heavy, exhausting manual work it’s obscene to have the finishing line moved at such short notice.
Yes times are different. Many more people spend time in higher education nowadays and therefore pay NI for a much shorter period. House prices and rents are higher, but so are salaries. If we were to return to the mortgage interest rates of 16.9% that I had to pay there really would be an outcry.
Oh and I think you’ll find that outside of staff office and government workers (NHS, teaching, civil service etc) final salary pension pots were a bit of a myth anyway.
Most public sector worker haven’t had a final salary pension or retirement at 60 for years.
Also, no one has “paid in” to their state pension. There is no state pension pot, the state pension is a contributions based benefit, no more no less. Hence the need to raise the state pension age.
The reality is that my generation’s working women were told from day one that if we paid our National Insurance we would receive a state pension at age 60. Yes there was a difference with men’s retirement age, but there were also huge differences in our pay and career expectations. State pensions are based on the number of years National Insurance payments one has made. That to my mind is a contract. We kept up our side; successive governments, of all three main political parties did not honour their side.
I was due to collect my state pension in 2014. When Gordon Brown’s moved the goalposts for some, I checked with the appropriate department. I was told I would not be affected.
Then in 2011 I checked again. I would now have to wait a further five years. Less than a year later I checked again; now I would have to wait six years.
If many of us had known that was going to be the case we might have made different choices during our most productive years.
If you have an expectation that if you play by the rules, contracts will be honoured please try to imagine how it feels when at the point you are slowing down, physically tired, maybe with health issues that mean no employer will insure you to do the work that you did, or you’re physically not able to do hard and heavy manual labour (this doesn’t just affect those sitting behind a desk in a warm office) then you’re told - when it’s too late in life for you to plan otherwise - that you will have to work a further six years. You will have to carry on paying National Insurance - whether you’ve got a contract (no hope of finding a staff job - or a contract for that matter - at your age) in order to qualify for the minimum state pension. I couldn’t stop paying my NI in 2014 - with a mere 44 years of NI contributions or I wouldn’t qualify for a full pension when (or if) I reached that always just out of reach finishing line. I have to pay till the day I reach it on my 66th birthday.
I could have done a lot with the £40,000 I would have received over those lost six years.
Many families have gone into debt because of that. Things like the 60+ Oystercard make all the difference for some lucky enough to have found a job in being able to get to it or not.
I don’t disagree with the principle of state pension age equalisation but what is unacceptable is how those women that were going to be affected by the rise from 60 to 65 were not advised by the relevant government department of the time to enable us to plan appropriately, and that most of us only found out decades later.
Just for clarity John Major’s government legislated for equalization of pensionable age to take effect in 2018 back in 1995. Gordon Brown’s government legislated to increase that age to 66 by 2026 stepping up a year in 2036 and again in 2046. David Cameron’s government accelerated that process in 2011 with the next rise to 66 brought forward to 2018.
I note the BackTo60 campaign has been given leave to appeal the 2019 high court decision. I wish them good luck.
The EU directive you speak of is from 1979. And it called for the equal access of men and women to social services. A principle I think even the Tory party had partly come to agree with by 1995. I’m also certain the decision Majors government made then was partly fiscal when considering the financial burden pensions would have with an aging population living longer.
If the 1979 directive, 16 years later was the sole reason for the Major Government’s actions they could have easily lowered pensionable age for men to 60 or find some middle ground.
If you are suggesting the Government was forced to take an action they didnt want to, it’s worth pointing out it is the same Government which signed the Maastricht Treaty only a few years later.
I can remember talking to TUC officials back in the 80s, when I suggested equalizing the retirement age at 63. Nothing happened. Had we known then, when we were young and strong and at the peak of our earning powers we could have made different life choices.
Thank you for your good luck wishes @starman But I was actually thinking not just of changes to state pension age, but of the moving the goalposts due to Gordon Brown’s pension tax changes that I believe led to many a final salary pension scheme being scrapped.