Why Penalise the Pensioners ?
SIR,—The necessity of more production has been, quite rightly, urged upon us ever since 1945 and successive Chancellors have aimed at giving incentives. Can any responsible person, therefore, give a plausible reason why women aged 60-65 and men aged 65-70 receiving retirement pensions and taking up part-time work should be limited to earning the excessively low amount of £2 per week by the deduction of any amount earned over £2 from the pension ?
Apart, from the injustice, this restriction is a very serious hardship to many pensioners who are either compelled to retire or feel unequal to a full-time job but are quite willing to work part-time.
A few retirement pensioners who have saved or otherwise acquired enough will not wish to work but the majority have little or nothing more than the pension.
Therefore those who are still willing to work within their capacity should not be restricted to a weekly income of £3 12s. 6d., while prices are continually driven against them by those still at work. So far as I understand the regulations the hardship is increased because the limit (L2) is not a weekly average of the yearly earnings but each week is taken separately.
Of course, no one expects to continue his employment after 65 and also draw his pension, but now that contributions are compulsory for all is there any valid reason why these pensioners should be treated differently from those who have been in the public service 7 Failing this equality, why should not the limit of £2 be raised ? To do so would cost nothing.
I appreciate that the present Government has both increased the pension and raised the limit of earnings and has lowered the tax on lower incomes, but it must be remembered that the pensioner, if a householder, meets the full blast of local rates, largely for education which he has already paid for on his own behalf or done without.
Surely the Chancellor does not consider it better for the nation that pensioners should be .driven to the National Assistance Board with its means test, thus reversing the whole aim of social insurance, rather than allow them to contribute to the best of their ability to the nation's production.—Yours faithfully, RETIREMENT PENSIONER.
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