OUTRAGEOUS TREATMENT OF WIDOWS by Paul Lewis

Sandra Manning has raised three children, looked after her grandchildren so that her daughter-in-law could work and cares for her 88 year old mother. But now, at the age of 57, Mrs Manning who was widowed last October has to get her first full time job since she was married nearly 30 yrs ago.

Her husband, John retired in February last year. "we planned to do so much, he had worked hard to provide for a good retirement. But soon after he stopped work he was diagnosed with cancer. Although he had a good pension, there was nothing for me, it died with him. All I get is £75.50 a week bereavement allowance from the state. When that ends in October I will have nothing unless I go out to work."

Mrs Manning is a victim of Government changes to widow's benefit made in April 2001. Before then, widows aged at least 55 when they got bereaved got a full widow's pension of £75.50 a week until they reached 60 and could claim a full retirement pension, while widows as young as 45 got a widow's pension at a reduced rate. But this was abolished for anyone bereaved after April 8 last year.

Now new widows under 60 without dependant children get a bereavement allowance for 12 months. After that they are on their own.

Previously, Mrs Manning would have got a widow's pension from when her husband died until she reached 60 in March 2004, a total of three and half years. In addition, the widow's pension would have been topped by the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) earned by her husband, an extra £60 a week in her case. But that extra pension is not added to the bereavement allowance, she has to wait until she is 60mto get it. So whereas before she would have got around £135 a week for nearly three and half years, now she gets just £75.50 a week for one year.

Under the new system Mrs Manning is around £20,000 worse off, her share of the £500 million the changes will save the Government each year. "That's a lot of money and it will have to come out of my savings and earnings" she said.

More cuts to follow

There is worse to come, Men and Women within 10 years of pension age have recently been warned by the DWP that if they are widowed after October 5 this year, they may get less money when the reach pension age. At 60 a widow gets a state retirement pension based on her late husband's National Insurance contribution record.

Usually she will get a full single person's pension, currently £75.50 a week, and can inherit her husband's entitlement to SERPS which at present she gets it in full. After October 5 new rules apply The amount of SERPS that she will inherit depends on her late husband's date of Birth. If he was born before October 6 1937, she will get his entitlement in full at 60 but if he was born on or after October 6 1945, she will get just half his SERPS at 60. There is a sliding scale for men born between those dates.

The tragedy is that none of these savings was necessary because bereavement benefits and SERPS are paid out of the National Insurance fund which at the end of March 2002 had a surplus of more than £24 billion around £15 billion more than the Government Actuary says it needs.

NI Record

These changes have failed to give men equal benefits, although it is true that those bereaved from April 9, 2001 now have the same rights. And men with a dependant child can claim widowed parents allowance even if they were widowed before then. But entitlement depends on the deceased person's National Insurance record and married women, particularly of this generation, are much less likely to have a full NI record than married men. So many bereaved men will find they are not entitled to a bereavement allowance as their late wife had not paid sufficient contributions.

GROWING OLDER IN SOCIALLY DEPRIVED AREAS

Deprivation and Poverty

The current Government's attempt to tackle serious financial deprivation among older people, in the form of the Minimum Income Guarantee, often appears to break down before it reaches those experiencing the greatest need. The failure to deliver an adequate standard of living to a significant minority of older people through a complex range of benefits would tend to lend support to the view that a simpler national system of higher minimum pension might represent a better way of alleviating poverty in later life.

Putting more money into the hands of older people can increase the sustainability of local services and amenities (e.g. shops, post offices and public transport) as well as having health benefits that might ultimately reduce demand for a range of health care services. In this light, it would be useful to consider the role played by benefit take-up campaigns in terms of their broader impact on local communities. Tackling barriers to the take-up of benefit entitlements is an urgent task for social policy. Many older people who took part in our research appear to be unfamiliar with the workings of the system and unsure of their entitlement to a range of benefits.

For some, barriers to completing application forms for benefits include lack of appropriate language and literacy skills; lack of appropriate official documents such as birth or marriage certificates; the complexities of telephone help lines; and the technical language used by benefits officials.

There is considerable scope for improving both the quantity and quality of welfare advice that is available to older people in deprived communities. This suggests the need for a stable, properly-funded welfare advice presence in deprived neighbourhoods.

Crime and fear of crime

Overall, 40 per cent of respondents in our survey have had experience of one or more types of crime. The respective proportion of those in poverty was 48 per cent compared with 33 per cent of those not in poverty. This finding is important in terms of social policy. Increasing the incomes of the poorest pensioners is likely to reduce their vulnerability to crime. Assistance with installation of security devices, such as good quality locks and alarm systems, may also reduce the vulnerability of those pensioners in poverty.

Having the confidence to leave one's home at all hours of the day and evening is likely to benefit people's physical and mental health. Sustained attempts must be made to prevent and reduce crime in deprived areas as well as to reassure older people that some of their concerns might not be justified. The role to be played by the neighbourhood or street wardens who operate in some high-crime neighbourhoods is potentially important. Consideration should also be given to changing the physical characteristics of neighbourhoods, for example by improving street lighting or installing surveillance cameras at strategic locations.

The closure of a number of urban post offices in recent years appears to have hit older people in deprived neighbourhoods hardest. Where people have to travel further and longer to reach a post office, they are likely to be even more fearful of becoming a victim of crime.

Neighbourhood and social integration

It is important that architects and urban planners are aware of the potential impact of their designs and plans on the type of low-level social interactions that make neighbourhoods good places to Live. Resources should be devoted to clearing up Litter and graffiti as quickly as possible in order to maintain a sense that the area is being looked after. Older people who are already disadvantaged in terms of poverty or ill health are disproportionately affected by the loss of local services. Consideration should be given at an early stage to the Likely impact on older people of decisions to withdraw such services from deprived neighbourhoods. Material insecurity, low levels of literacy, language barriers, lack of self-confidence, perceived vulnerability to crime and a lack of opportunities to become involved are among the factors likely to prevent some people from engaging with formal aspects of community Life. It would be useful to develop further research that examines these factors in more depth.

BASIC AVERAGE ESSENTIAL NEEDS FOR STATE PENSIONERS (ONE WEEK)

Information compiled by Eastern Region NPC

Food

Toiletries

Other Expenses

Expensive items have been excluded as pensioners cannot afford to buy them such as a joint of meat, certain types of fish, steak cream cakes etc

Hairdressing is included as most elderly cannot cut their own hair, and ladies hairdressing is quite expensive.

This estimate does not include marmalade, jams, pickles, sauces etc which is not purchased every week.

PENSION BOOKS START TO GET THEIR MARCHING ORDERS

Early signs of the changeover from paying benefits and pensions by order book to direct payments into personal accounts are already appearing.

Four thousand of a proposed 40,000 keypads are already fixed on the customer side of post office counters and the first letters to people receiving war pensions, are being sent out. "Payment into bank accounts" is the Department for Work and Pensions' new name for the changeover, and the letters explain your options for receiving benefit if you don't have a bank account.

They are:-

It is specifically for this last option that the keypads are appearing.

A Post Office card account will work like this, your card account can only receive benefit money from the DWP. You will get a plastic swipe card and a unique four figure Personal Identification Number (PIN). You take your card to any Post Office and pass it to the counter clerk, who will ask you how much money you want. You can have any amount up to what is in your account. You will be asked to tap in your PIN into the keypad to confirm security and the clerk will hand over your cash.

Different benefits will be brought into the new system over the next two years. About six months before a particle benefit is due to switch (with war pensions among the first) people who are now paid through a order will get a letter from the DWP explaining what will happen when order books are no longer available.

Most pensioners will not be hearing from the DWP for some time but when your letter does arrive, it will be important to act on it and choose whichever options that suits you best.

All three new systems offer more security and flexibility than order books but you will need to decide what combination of advantages you prefer. Help the Aged will provide more information over the next few months.

"The Government expects less than 75 per cent of those entitled to the Credit to claim it in the first three years".

Half the pensioner population will be entitled to the Pension Credit (the new benefit that will replace the Minimum Income Guarantee) when it is introduced in October 2003. The Government has given its first indication of how many pensioners it expects to claim and it's far, far fewer than it should be.

In this year's spending review, the treasury set Government departments their performance targets for the next three years and allocate money to achieve them. One object is paying three million pensioner households the Pension Credit by 2006.

In April, however, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) revealed that 4.1 million pensioner households would be eligible for the new credit. This means that the Government expects less than 75 per cent of those entitled to the credit to claim it in the first three years, At Help the Aged, we have written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer asking him to explain how he arrived at the figure and urging him to impose a tougher target on the DWP.

The latest government figures show that many as 777,000 pensioners who are entitled to the MIG are not claiming it. Nor are more than a million pensioners who should be receiving Council Tax Benefit. These figures estimate that there could be almost as much as £2 million in means tested benefits going unclaimed each year by pensioners.

People already receiving the MIG will automatically be moved on to the Credit, others will have to make a claim. Claims can be processed up to six months before the Credit is introduced in October 2003.

PENSIONER VIEWPOINTby Alan Abbott

PRIVATE PENSION SCHEMES WILL NOT DELIVER

Our column this month does not address today's pensioners as much as those who will retire in the future. Although both are very much involved in dealing with the problem outlined.

Recent UK governments have been, and are, obsessed with privatising every publicly funded commodity within sight, and we don't have to look far to see the evidence, Public transport, electricity, gas, water, telephones and in recent years pensions. Can we see any benefits to the users of these facilities? I think not, and they are all services on which people depend for the quality of their lives.

Our concern at the moment is how this obsession applies to pensions, for the present government is trying hard to persuade working people that their life in retirement will be improved if they invest in commercial pension schemes while they are working. The previous paragraph just puts this situation in its broader setting.

There are in general two forms of private pension. One is where employees pay into their employer's scheme. These were traditionally based on the size of the pension individually relating to the monthly wages or salary earned just before retirement multiplied by the number of years in the scheme. This would be divided by a figure agreed within the scheme, usually between eighty and one hundred and fifty .The lower that figure is, the higher the pension, and the better the scheme. The alternative type of scheme is offered by insurance companies, and one' shops around to find the best buy'.

Both types of pension are based on the money paid into the scheme being invested to provide profit. In other words the money is used to gamble on the stock exchange, and we read daily in our papers how that market goes up and down in varying degrees of violence.

Falling share prices have already weakened many pension funds, and employers protect their profits by changing the formula for deciding what size the pension will be, in order to payout smaller pensions. The new threat to these commercial pension funds comes when companies cut their dividends. The Guardian's Finance expert, George Hodgson, writes, "Falling Share prices have already weakened many pension funds, accelerating the move by employers to try to shift the investment risk onto the workforce."

"Falling dividends have always been viewed more far more dangerous than dropping share prices." The pension fund professionals are expecting to see many dividend cuts this winter, which means that a great number of working people will be told that their pensions will be smaller than previously agreed.

The organised pensioners' movement has been saying for years that stock market based pensions are no substitute for realistically sized state pensions, and the situation that we are in demonstrates the accuracy of this analysis.