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Pensioners out in the cold - for The Inverness Courier
HUGE hikes in energy prices and big rises in the price of food are hitting household budgets all over the Highlands.
But one group is hit harder than most by these cash-draining changes: pensioners.
Far too many older people rely solely for their income on the paltry basic state pension and many do not claim the means-tested pension credit top-up that is available.
The government likes to tell us that it is working hard to make it easier for poorer pensioners to claim the additional money. But the figures given in the budget tell a very different story. After all, if the government was genuinely planning to get more cash to more pensioners, you would assume that the increased spending would be budgeted for in plans for future years.
If every pensioner who is entitled to pension credit were to claim it, the cost would be an additional £1.75 billion a year. But that extra cash was not included in Alastair Darling's budget last month.
In fact, treasury spending figures anticipate no increase in the uptake of key benefits for pensioners in the next three years — including pension credit and the winter fuel payment — despite ministers saying they want to make it easier for people to get what they are entitled to.
A leaked government document suggested that the government now believes that trying to get more people, including pensioners, to take up benefits to which they are entitled is "poor value for money".
The response when I pressed the Department for Work and Pensions on this last week in the House of Commons suggested that Alastair Darling's treasury was pressing for pension spending to be kept down.
The truth is that the number of older people who still do not get the support they are entitled to is simply unacceptable.
Many of the people who are still unable or unwilling to claim benefits desperately need help to meet ever-rising living costs, especially for essential things like energy bills.
The government agrees that the system needs to be simpler, but they have failed to allocate funding for more pensioners to receive what they are due. Their position looks half-hearted at best and disingenuous at worst.
We need a simpler, fairer basic state pension that does not require more than half of pensioners to rely on means-tested top ups to stay out of poverty. And we need to increase the pension in line with earnings, so that it goes up more rapidly and pensioners have some extra money to help meet the extra costs. Where older people are concerned, government penny-pinching should take second place to ensuring that people have the dignified retirement that they have earned throughout their lives.
BALLOCH POST OFFICE
The Post Office's outrageous decision to continue with the closures planned in the Highlands was a bitter blow to many communities across our area.
When I forced a debate on closures in the Highlands, the government minister complacently said that we in the Highlands should be happy because we were losing fewer vital offices that the average. In fact, like too much this government says, that is not true — the proportion of closures is very slightly higher than the average.
And the figures gets higher if we include the Post Offices closed by stealth and completely ignored when the public consultation took place. There were numerous representations from the community in Balloch for the re-instatement of the Post Office lost when the Somerfield supermarket closed. There was not even a sentence in the consultation response to acknowledge the strength of feeling, or the power of the local case.
I will not let this matter rest here. I have asked both the Post Office and Postwatch, the regulator, to come to Balloch to meet the community and reconsider the decision to airbrush its Post Office out of history.
I see no reason why this community should give in to the attempts to deny them the essential services of a local post office. At the very least, there should be an open, public debate about it.
Posted on: 08/04/2008
