Age Concern Hampshire

In addition to its direct service provision, Age Concern Hampshire has major campaigns on “age discrimination”, “poverty” and “long term care”.

We believe that:

• Everyone has the right to decide when to retire and that this should be a positive choice based upon their job satisfaction, health, financial position and personal circumstances:
• Everyone should be guaranteed an income in retirement above the European Poverty line – i.e 60% of national average earnings. There are currently 2.8m people, one in four of the retired population, living below the European poverty line.
• It is grossly unfair that those people who, through no fault of their own, require long term care should have to sell their houses and use up their savings to pay for it. The need strikes at random and is the kind of shared risk which should best be met by society as a whole.

We are concerned that older people appear to be taking a disproportionate share of the austerity measures with the impact of the economic situation on savings and annuities, introduction of charges and cuts in services and the move from an RPI to a CPI link. We are concerned at the demise of “final salary defined benefit pensions” and believe that once the first payment is made there should be a contract which is honoured.