Yes vote will cost pensioners £420 a year
PENSIONERS would be more than £400 a year worse off if Scotland votes No, a Labour report will claim today.
It will say Scotland’s one million pensioners are better off remaining part of the UK.
The paper, to be launched at a rally tonight, calculates Scotland gets an extra £417 million a year in ‘pensioner benefit’ than it would if based on a share of population. That works out at nearly £420 a head.
Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont warned: ‘The best future for Scotland is one where we make key decisions at the Scottish parliament, but we are backed by the security and stability of the United Kingdom. We see that in pensions, where our ability to pool and share resources across 60 million people rather than five million people means that, on average, every Scots pensioner is around £500 better off because we are part of the UK.
‘John Swinney admits in private that he doubts if an independent Scotland could afford the state pension and so far the Yes campaign has failed to answer the hard questions being asked by the pensions industry.’
The paper will be launched tonight by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Scottish Labour pension spokesman Gregg McClymont at a United with Labour event in Cumbernauld, Lanarkshire.
But Glasgow Nationalist MSP Bob Doris said: ‘This is meaningless and wrong – pensions will be paid on time and in full in an independent Scotland, and we will also have the powers to review Westminster’s unfair plans to accelerate the age when people get the state pension. That’s one reason why the Scottish Social Attitudes survey shows that 63 per cent of people want pensions policy to be decided in Scotland, not by Westminster.’
Pensioners have been targeted by the SNP, which has pledged not to raise the state pension age beyond 66. It has also promised a single-tier state pension rise linked to whichever is highest – average wage increases, inflation or 2.5 per cent.
But the most recent YouGov poll, published last week, found 58 per cent of people over the age of 60 will vote No, compared to only 33 per cent who will vote Yes.