You do see some bollocks on social media. Quite apart from endless gurning holiday selfies and dreary status announcements where everything is great and nothing is average, there are some of the most pointless debates/arguments/squabbles (delete where appropriate) about things that barely matter, posted by people with far too much time on their hands. And, confession time, I am sometimes I walk among these people. The latest subject of monumental irrelevance was the state pension and whether it was a benefit.
Many older people become extremely defensive when this subject is mentioned, quite possibly because of the way any debate on social security benefits descends into the age-old subject of scroungers and fraudsters. “We have worked all our lives and paid in to get our pensions,” some say, “And it is definitely not a benefit.” We are far better people than benefit claimants, they don’t add, but should. But they aren’t. The state pension, or the Retirement Pension as many of us call it, is the very definition of a state benefit because that is literally what it is.
The argument has been skewed because of the widespread assumption that benefit claimants get something for nothing and some people get quite angry about that. And while it is true that many state benefits do not require a financial contribution, some of the big ones do. Others are what is known as ‘means-tested‘. I worked for many years for the DWP benefit fraud investigation service and while I accept that there is fraud within the system, not helped by the last Conservative government which moved away from prosecuting serious fraudsters in order to go for the easy hits, it is not the epidemic some say.
I find it sad that the term state benefits are dirty words. If you suffer from a serious disability or a terminal illness, you are not one of the shirkers the Daily Mail warned you about. Sure, the money that sustains you comes from the taxpayer, but that, to me anyway, is a price worth paying in a society which is hopelessly imbalanced between rich and poor.
I grew up in a time where there was a clear and straightforward separation of contributory and means-tested benefits. If you were sick or disabled, you needed to have paid in National Insurance contributions in order to get your Sickness and Invalidity benefits. The same with unemployment benefits. If you had not, there were means-tested benefits you could claim. There are more blurred lines nowadays, with the emphasis very much on means-testing and paying claimants as little as the government can get away with, along with a tight, some might say vicious, system of sanctions. But the something for something system remains at the heart of the benefits system. The same with the Retirement Pension.
If you pay National Insurance throughout your life, you will get a state pension at the end of it, based on what you have paid. You can make voluntary National Insurance payments, as I did, despite having worked full time for 39 years, to boost your pension. If your state pension is not enough to live on, you can claim the means-tested Pension Credit. Pension Credit is a state benefit, just like the Retirement Pension.
I have no issue being referred to as a benefit claimant, not least because that is what I am. I do not see it as something to be embarrassed about. When I started work, I effectively entered into a contract with the government that would guarantee me a pension when I retired, a contributory state benefit called the Retirement Pension. If attitudes have changed towards benefits and benefit claimants, not least because of populist right-wing politicians and the gutter press, it does not mean that the definition of what constitutes a state pension has. No. The reason some attitudes have changed is down to snobbery.
Many pensioners have never had it so good. They are the only group of people to enjoy the ‘triple lock‘ for annual pension upgrades and while it is true that there are pockets of pensioner poverty, my anecdotal experience from working for a food bank is that we rarely, if ever, get a visit from a senior citizen. I believe this is an accurate reflection of how things are nationally and it shows how effect one state benefit, the Retirement Pension, has been, when it is bolstered by an occupational pension and/or the Pension Credit.
The UK state pension is, 100%, a social security benefit, the ultimate contributory benefit. It represents 52% of the state benefits bill. How about celebrating that fact rather than pretending it’s something else? Benefits exist for a reason and they help keep our society civilised. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? And when far right populist politicians like the Fagash Fuhrer Farage talk about slashing the benefits bill, pensioner benefit claimants should be very afraid.
