The reason why I feel an injustice has been committed here is because the premise of a final salary pension was that the pensioner would die within a handful of years of retiring. That's what happened when Beveridge and Bevan were in power. Life expectancy and wealth shot up during the baby boomer era but instead of pushing the retirement age out, or abolishing the concept of a final salary pension... 'early retirement' was introduced. That was wrong, plain and simple. What's more it was known to be wrong when it was done.
My father retired from a semi state organization aged around 50. Having worked for less than 30 years, he's now been retired on half his final salary for almost 20 ! He's not alone, he's part of an entire generation who did this.
The 'personal pension' system hasn't worked either. All it has done is to provide captial for city traders to gamble with. The 'investment' options are too woolley and even if the weren't, the man in the street is not educated enough to be able to make choices the correct choices on investments in any event.
My solution [I have to offer you something to deride me properly on... so here you go] would be to have a state run pension system which would demand a minimum contribution level over a person's life, but which could be enhanced by additional voluntary contributions. This would be used to pay for retirement income, healthcare and long term care. The retirement age would be set to increase in line with life expectancy so that the period of retirement, on average, would be relatively short.
This opens a myriad of questions of course - e.g. what happens if people spend their life on the dole, or people cannot work until the minimum retirement age etc... All of the can be dealt with of course, but what we need to look at doing is getting a fair solution for the normal majority that doesn't transfer the burden to others.
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