February has now passed, and we are already well into March!! I was reminded by the Deputy General Secretary that if Harry Secombe had indeed ruled the world, “Every day would be the first day of spring”. We have had some lovely glasses of yellow daffodils in the office this week, so thankfully that’s helped to cheer us up despite the relentless rain tapping against the windows.
Recent weeks have seen us take part in a flurry of meetings to promote CSPA campaigns. We have met with MPs including Sir Stephen Timms MP, Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, and David Linden MP, the SNP’s lead on Social Justice.
We have used these opportunities to discuss our asks of all the main political parties, based on the Later Life Ambitions pensioners’ manifesto demands. In particular, we have highlighted the need for a longstanding commitment to increase the State Pension by the triple-lock, the importance of a national framework for health and social care. We have raised concerns about some of the additional clauses proposed for the Data Protection Bill, currently going through parliament, which have raised the spectre of future governments having access to pensioners’ bank accounts, potentially offering the facility to means test the State Pension.
I was pleased to be given the opportunity to address the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Women and Work on the topic “The Sixties: Pensions, Prejudice and Grandparenthood”, which gave me a chance to challenge popular misconceptions about “gold-plated” Civil Service pensions and set out the true picture facing the ‘average’ woman retiring from the public sector in the light of the significant gender gap in pension entitlements.
A recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies on ‘The Gender Gap in Pension Saving’ makes for sobering reading in observing that, whilst men have the equivalent of a £205,000 pension ‘pot’ in defined contributions schemes whilst, on average, women in these ‘money-purchase’ pensions are left with a fund of only £69,000.
A gender gap also exists within the Civil Service pension schemes. The average woman retiring with a Civil Service pension currently receives only £7,500 a year, whilst the average man in receipt of a pension receives almost twice as much at around £13,500.
Significantly, once this ‘average woman’ on a Civil Service pension adds to it her State Pension income, she is likely to have to pay more than £1,000 in income tax on her pensions’ earnings! This is all down to the freezing of the personal tax threshold in recent years, and we are making no bones about how unacceptable we think this is, especially in the light of the ever-rising cost-of-living.
On a brighter note, we were pleased to see the Treasury confirm the 6.7% increase for Civil Service pensioners from April 2024, in line with the September CPI. This will be welcome relief alongside the rise in the State Pension of 8.5%. We have posted recent news articles on the CSPA website for you to read if you would like further details.
I hope you will be enjoying your Spring issue of The Pensioner magazine by now. We wanted to draw your attention to our call for members’ views on our CSPA Annual General Meeting arrangements, and how we might need to change or improve these, or not, in future.
The Executive Committee has convened a working group on this topic to report to their meeting in late April, and they are particularly interested to hear from members who live in areas not covered by active, local CSPA groups on how we might best support their participation in our democratic processes. Please turn to page 5 in the magazine for more information.