KENNETH Macaulay (Letters, May 17) is right to point out that retirement pensions paid out by the Government are not a “benefit”, but an entitlement which all recipients have subscribed to by their National Insurance contributions throughout their working lives.
If successive governments in the 60-odd years had had the basic financial sense to set up a separate State Insurance Fund to receive these regular contributions from all employers and employees (as all companies running employees’ pensions fund were legally required to do) that national fund would have grown steadily over the years, and today’s retirement pensions could have been fully funded without recourse to current government expenditure.
But instead the regular NI contributions handed over to the Treasury were simply poured into the same bucket as everything else, and ever since annual income topped up by borrowing has been used to finance all public expenditure, including retirement pensions.
Even in the annual GERS Report, although National Insurance contributions from Scotland of £9.32 billion are reported separately in the list of government revenue, the annual outlay on retirement pensions is not shown separately in the schedule of payments. Instead it is simply lumped together with unemployment relief and all other state benefits of £23.53bn, under the extremely vague and misleading description of “social protection”, and thus treated as current government expenditure to be funded from current revenue.
Elderly pensioners like myself are thus wrongly presented as being a financial burden living off the taxes paid by today’s hard-working employees, when in fact we have already paid for our measly state pensions several times over. And the problem will only get worse, as both men and women are now living several years longer than even 20 years ago.
Iain AD Mann,
7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.
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