Pensions misery

Elderly pay the price for crisis

THE COST of living crisis seems to get worse with each passing week.

The food in our shopping trollies, the fuel in our cars and the energy that heat our homes are reaching such unimaginably high levels as to make most of us seriously rethink our spending.

However one section of our society does not have the luxury of being able to reconfigure its finances so easily.

The half a million pensioners living in Yorkshire are facing an increase in their payments well below inflation rates, which the Bank of England forecasts will reach 7.25 per cent this month.

Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Jonathan Ashworth has warned that thousands of older people in Yorkshire will be pushed into poverty as a result of what he calls the “biggest real terms cut to the pension in 50 years”.

Mr Ashworth called on local Tory MPs to put pressure on Chancellor Rishi Sunak to rethink the suspension of elements of the triple lock, constituting what analysts say is the largest real-terms fall in pensions since 1980.

While the Government says it “remains committed” to restoring the pensions triple lock for the rest of the Parliament as it wrestles with the economic carnage that Covid has brought to the nation’s finances, this will be of little comfort to those people who worked hard their entire life in the entirely reasonable expectation of being cared for by the state in their old age.

No-one would argue that measures must to be taken to shore up the nation’s economy. But to expect the old and infirm to face such uncertainty is not the hallmark of the great nation they helped build for us all.