Mr Green sick with worry about the pensions crisis in BHS

PLEASE SIR, CAN I WORK A LITTLE LONGER?

Well, I bet you didn’t know it, but I’ll pass on a message from Mr Duncan-Smith.

Most people want to work past 65!

There! Just like 30 years ago when Mrs Thatcher told people that they wanted to pay for their eye tests. No one but the government actually knows what we are thinking, least of all us.

Anyway, Duncan-Smith is launching a major overhaul of the pensions system, which is aimed at encouraging people to save for their old age. Yep, you read that right: some of the lowest incomes, the highest priced housing, ditto transport, petrol, cars, supermarkets, etc. Mortgages that break us till we are 60, and for the English student, fees that rival mortgages in size....and Mr Duncan-Smith thinks we should be saving more.

What a plonker this bloke is.

The biggest joke is that inflation is, in reality at around 10-12% (at least for the poorer people), interest rates are around 1-3%, so every pound you save loses about 10p in value every year, meaning that if you save hard enough for long enough you will be left with enough for a cup of tea.

And don’t think for a second that the answer is to put the money in a pension fund. Ask the investors in Equitable Life about that! There's new government scheme designed to force employers to enroll people in saving schemes (by any other name, a tax increase).

So first National Insurance goes up, and now forced saving for a pension! How many ways can you put up income tax without saying you are putting up income tax?

How does Mr Duncan-Smith know that we want to go on working longer than we have to? Is it because he asked us? Bwa ha ha!

It’s because his friends at the top of government and business in England don’t have any desire to stop work. And why would they? Excellent pay, great conditions, people fawning all over you, chauffeur driven cars (forget all that nonsense that Cameron spouted about ministers using public transport. Like most of the rest of his pronouncements it was garbage). But go ask someone who has done a manual job and is worn out by the time they are 55; ask someone who stacks shelves in Tesco, or teaches in a badly disciplined, underfunded, inner city school, whose nerves are frayed by the time they are 40; ask a postman who gets up at 4 every morning, or a nurse who works shifts; ask a care worker in a retirement home who’s been making beds and lifting patients for 30 years.

In fact, ask most people who have to cope with rat race unreachable targets for greedy bosses with the management style of Pol Pot.

Go on Mr Duncan-Smith. Ask them.

Yes people are living longer, and yes people of your class are living active lives for much longer. You’ve been pampered all your days: the best of everything. But not everyone has been so fortunate. Some sleep in damp rooms, with no central heating or no double glazing; some have been injured at work and never got better; some lived on substandard food...yes and smoked and drank... so what?

By 55 some are finished. They may live to 90, but it’s no life.

Go away and think again. I don’t know one single person from my circle of acquaintances and friends: teachers, doctors, civil servants, shop workers, taxi drivers, lecturers, chefs, painters, joiners... and so on, that wants to work a day past the current retirement.

And I don’t know one single retired person who wishes themselves back in the rat race.

Oh, and stop blaming the EU for the fact that men and women will have to retire at the same age. It’s nothing to do with them; it’s to do with equality laws which we have had since 1975. And since you brought it up, why does the UK have the lowest pensions by comparison to wages in the EU? What do you people do with the money?

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PENSION CRISIS SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE

The Daily Mail seems to be surprised by the fact that research has reveal that one in three people in their 50s has saved nothing for their future. This means that millions of people will spend an old age of financial misery living on only a state pension. Frankly I find it less surprising. The Daily Mail, it seems, is out of touch with how ordinary people live.

The failure to put something away has been put down to a “spend rather than save” culture over the last few decades. But I would suggest that it could be put down to the fact that at the bottom of the income scale there is simply no money left at the end of the week/month for savings. There is always something to use the money on.

And it isn’t going to get any better. With many people taking pay freezes whilst inflation (real inflation, not the government’s invented figure) is soaring. Electricity, gas, petrol, food and clothes are all increasing in price at a rate far above the “official” inflation figures, and bus and rail fares are set to increase, along with a hike in VAT.

This will leave working people with even less disposable income.

It is all very well for the government to say that they need to increase the amount that people save for retirement, but with all the demands that there are for the meagre incomes that some people have, together with the fact that interest rates in banks mean that money deposited is actually reduced in value over the year, it is a tall order to ask people to save.

Company final salary pension schemes which used to take care of people’s needs in retirement have all but disappeared and, many have failed and people no longer trust them. It’s hard to believe that we once had the best pensions in the world...until Gordon Brown got his hands on them!

Private pensions, it seems to me, are hardly worth having. They depend entirely upon the value of the stock market at the time of retrial, and if you have no choice about when you are going to retire, you can end up with a terrible deal.

And, at the bottom end of the market, if you can only save a small amount, you are better off having nothing and taking advantage of the safety net which will take you from £5000 a year state pension, to £7,000 (still less than half what is regarded as the poverty rate in the UK). In other words, if you are likely to have private pension of around £40 a week, you would be better not to bother saving, because you will receive this amount in benefits.

The current government hopes to scrap this system by the end of the parliament, and replace it with a pension of around £140 a week for everyone, which will take away one of the disincentives for the poorest to save. However, this is an aspiration rather than a concrete policy, and I have doubts whether they will be able to do it.

They also want to force companies to enrol employees on to a pension scheme, although who will fund this is not clear at present.

One thing for sure, there are many people looking forward to the bleakest of futures on a miserable pittance.