The Chancellor's granny tax: what does it mean?

You may have wondered what all the fuss was about with Georgie-Porgie's‘granny  tax’. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to take away the age-related tax allowance for people over 65. Here is what he said in the budget speech:

We should also simplify the age-related allowances, which the Office of Tax Simplification recently highlighted as a particularly complicated feature of the tax system. The National Audit Office points out that many pensioners do not understand them. These allowances require around 150,000 pensioners to fill in self-assessment forms, and as we have real increases in the personal allowances, their value is already being eroded.

So over time we will simplify the tax system for pensioners by doing away with the complexity of the additional age-related allowances for anyone reaching the age of 65 on or after 6 April 2013, and I will freeze the cash value of the allowance for existing pensioners until it aligns with the personal allowance. This will protect the existing level of allowance pensioners have while introducing a new single personal allowance for all. It is a major simplification, it saves money, and no pensioner will lose in cash terms.

To read the speech go here: 2012 Budget speech; Hansard:  21 Mar 2012 : Column 801

It’s not surprising that a lot of people missed this, because it came between simplifying VAT on soft drinks and take-away foods and the promise to send every taxpayer a statement of what they owe – I thought we already got that, but the wonderful improvement is that they’re going to tell us what they’re spending it on. Presumably this will be like those little booklets you get from your local council explaining why they’re putting up your Council Tax. I think this is one thing the government could save some money by not doing. Presumably it means that what under Labour was a marketing budget for advertising on hoardings what they were doing, this will be the same thing but hidden in the HMRC budget (HMRC is the taxman).

It is this interpolation in a statement on tax reforms that led the press to say that that this was a cut that has been hidden in a tax simplification statement.

So what does it all mean?

This is what the government says in the Direct.gov Budget website:    

You can find this here: The Direct gov budget website This is the website for ordinary people.

The tax changes come first:

• The top rate of Income Tax will reduce from 50 per cent to 45 per cent in April 2013.
• The Income Tax personal allowance (the amount you can earn before you pay tax) will increase to £9,205 in April 2013.
• Age related allowances will be frozen from April 2013, moving towards a simpler, single personal allowance for everyone regardless of age

Then there is a section on pensions, which sets out the govenrment’s medium-term intentions:

• The government will reform the state pension system into a simpler, single tier State Pension for future pensioners. The new system will be introduced early in the next Parliament.
• Anyone reaching state pension age before the reforms are introduced will continue to receive their State Pension in line with current rules.
• The single tier will be set at a level above the basic level of the means test.
• The government has made it clear that it will recognise contributions that have been made to the current system under any reforms and will provide further detail in a White Paper in the spring.
• The government will commit to ensuring that the State Pension age is increased in future to take into account increases in life expectancy. Details of how this will work will be published this summer.
• There will be no changes to pension tax relief.

To look at the more formal statement, you have to dig into the Budget statement and documents. You can find the relevant paragraph here

The Treasury's budget documents

Here is the statement in the budget supporting documents:

Age-related allowances

1.199 The Office of Tax Simplification’s (OTS) interim report on pensioner taxation identified age-related allowances (ARAs) as a source of complexity in the tax system. Changes to the personal allowance made by this Government mean that the difference between existing ARAs and the personal allowance is reducing. In 2010 the difference was £3,015 and it will fall to £2,395 in 2013.

1.200 To support the goal of a single personal allowance for taxpayers regardless of age, and to spread the tax relief fairly across working age people and pensioners, from 6 April 2013 existing ARAs will be frozen at their 2012–13 levels (£10,500 for those born between 6 April 1938 and 5 April 1948, and £10,660 for those born before 6 April 1938) until they align with the personal allowance. From April 2013, ARAs will no longer be available, except to those born on or before 5 April 1948. The higher ARA will only be available to those born before 6 April 1938. These changes will simplify the system and reduce the number of pensioners in Self Assessment.

Where has this idea come from?

Since this refers to a previous, although only recently released, study we have to dig further back. The study referred to is:

Office of Tax Simplification (2012) Review of pensioners’ taxation: Interim report. London: author. published in March.

You can find it on the internet here: The OTS review of pensioners' taxation

Commentators on policy always look at a government report by starting from the organisation and people it has come from. The OTS is a Condem Coalition creation, associated with the attempts by the Coalition to have independent advice on myriad things to do with the Treasury; we are most familiar with the Office of Budget responsibility, which uses Treasury figures to calculate whether the Treasury is telling us the truth about various financial matters. This is clearly a Conservative think tank incorporated into the Treasury. You can see this from the Wikipedia account of the Chairman’s life history:

John Michael Jack (born 17 September 1946 in Folkestone, Kent, England) is the interim Chairman of the Office of Tax Simplification. Before he took upon this unpaid position that will be filled by a new appointment in 2011, he was a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom and was Member of Parliament for Fylde between 1987 and 2010, serving at various junior ministerial posts during the John Major administration.

It seems he got the job, because the OTS website, which you can see here OTS website gives a biography of him as chairman: 

Michael Jack served as the Member of Parliament for Fylde between 1987 and 2010 following a career in business. He served in a number of ministerial posts, including as Financial Secretary to the Treasury from 1995 to 1997. During his time as Financial Secretary he was responsible for establishing the Tax Law Rewrite project, which was tasked with rewriting the UK’s direct tax legislation in clearer and simpler language.

So what you have is a largely failed Conservative politician with a history in business. Not someone to be focusing on the interests of older people, although the report itself is well-sourced and had advisers who represented the older people’s organisations as well as business people.

The OTS report on pensioners' taxation

Basically, what this report says is that the pensioners' age-related tax allowance offends against the principles of having a good simple tax system because it is complicated to work out and people don’t know about it in advance; many probably don’t claim it. Therefore, it doesn’t help people preparing for retirement to know where they stand, and it doesn’t reliably get to the people who should be receiving it. It only affects pensioners in a middle band of taxation, who get more income, for example from private pensions or work, than the state pension rate. However, it tapers away, so it reduces as your income rises, this is also a problem, because it creates a higher rate of tax for people in this income bracket since they lose twice as much as they gain from any increase in income, until the whole allowance is tapered away.

The age-related allowance was a tax simplification in its time (when introduced by Denis Healey in 1974) and the aim was to help pensioners meet living costs. An example is the reality that a lot of annuities stay level and don’t increase with inflation; pensioners in this position get a gradually reducing real income because of inflation. Providing this sort of allowance is a judgement call, because younger people have increased living costs too, but for different reasons,. Also, pensioners living costs go up and down over time: they spend less once they pass the 75 years mark, because they tend to be less active then, and then their expenditure goes up as they become frailer and need more heat, specials food and so on. However, the very old (95+) tend not to need extra allowances. The question the paper asked was, should we be compensating a small group of pensioners through the tax system? It’s not well-targeted to those who might have particular needs.

Comment

The point is though that it is now being allowed to wither on the grappa-producing plants that means that those born before 5^th April 1948 will never get it (phew, I slipped in there). Notwithstanding what the government is saying about its medium-term aims, it is not clear that they are going to replace it with more generous help for people with very real needs – probably not, if their current attitude to spending anything is to be taken into account. But even though I might in principle get it, the taper will mean that it’ll be tapered away from me, and it’s not going to rise, so it will be worth less as I go on.

The OTS report actually includes a long list of things that the government could do, linking the whole thing up with marriage allowances and so on. Of course one of the things it might have done is to have a claiming campaign to make sure that everyone entitled was actually getting it. The possibility is mentioned, but I don’t see that in the Chancellor’s aims.

Incidentally, the OTS report is about far more than the tax-related allowance, so we can trawl through it to see what else they are going to do with older people's tax; presumably this is why the more general announcements were made that I quoted above from the Direct.gov website. Perhaps we'll be returning to this topic again.

Claiming the state pension

Another step on the grey path - I have rung up to claim my state pension. The rather dull-sounding Steve on the DWP phone line said it might take 20 minutes, but actually it took a 13 minutes 40 seconds, according to the phone. But only becuase I'd spent half an hour getting out all the information they asked for in their letter.

Explaining pensions: it's going to get worse

I am a great fan of the House of Commons Library, because they produce wonderful research reports, which explain complicated things in terms that even I can understand. I presume this is because they are for MPs (no, I’m not going to say they are all dim, I’m going to say…), who have to understand a whole range of current issues to explain to their constituents. The papers have very good links to all sorts of official documents, and they are written fairly neutrally, as befits a service for all MPs rather than for just the current or past party in power.

There’s a new one out on pensions, which explains policy issues very clearly, and is a pleasure to read (although it has a lot of misprints: I guess the new generation of civil servants are allowed to be less literate than the older generation, or the proof-reader got sleepy). In this post, I’ve set out some of the explanations about how defined-contribution pensions work in a simplified way, with pictures – even the HofC Library doesn’t do pictures. I’ve done this because I find that even very experienced and able people roll themselves up in a ball and hide when faced with explanations about pensions.

Then I comment on the contents, not neutrally.

You can download the paper from here: http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN00712.

Defined contribution pension schemes

The first point to make is that it is dealing with ‘defined contribution’ or money-payment pension schemes, not with the final salary schemes like many of the older generation of public sector employees have and some people in the private sector, but which are disappearing from sight. Defined contribution schemes work by you and your employer paying money in to a savings account to create a pile of money, called a ‘pension pot’. This is a sort of treasure trove to finance your retirement, when you will not be earning. When you retire, you hand over your pile to an insurance company (or some other pension provider) to buy a regular income from it. The insurance company takes your money and guarantees to hand over a sum every month. Handing over the pile to the company is called ‘buying an annuity’ and the regular sum every month is your ‘annuity’. There are various sorts of annuity, of which more later.

So the first stage is accumulating or saving money towards your pension pot; you do this during your working life. Then, when you retire, the second stage is ‘decumulation’ or spending the money. The diagram shows this process of building up to the pot, then spending out from the pot.

Most of the argument you see in the press is about the accumulation stage. The government, the trade unions and the employers are arguing about the best way of building it up so that you get the biggest pot possible, because this is what will pay for your pension. But people have also started to argue about problems with the decumulation phase too, and some people think there’s been much less effort on the part of the government and others involved to solve the problems with the decumulation phase.

The government has recently introduced arrangements to make sure every employee takes part in accumulating a pension, rather than permitting people to opt out. Broadly, people and their employers are free to make their own arrangements, but if they don’t, they have to take part in a minimalist government scheme so that they build up some sort of a pot.

But what would happen if the whole insurance system failed and annuities did not work out? There are real problems with annuities, which I discuss below, after this explanation. The National Association of Pension Funds argues that there should be a national annuity service which should step in if annuities run into trouble. You can see why the government would not want to take on this responsibility. But they’re probably unwise, because it’s sure to go wrong, and then they’ll have to deal with it anyway. A bit of prevention would be a good idea in my view.

How annuities work

There are various types of annuity you can buy. To understand these you need to understand how annuities work. It starts with you giving your pension pot to an insurance company. You can choose the company you accumulated or saved with or you can pick another one. Different insurance companies offer different ‘rates’. What this means is that Company A will offer you more or less money every month when you give them £100,000 than Companies B, C or D. As with anything, you can investigate who will offer you the best rate and go with them.

The next stage is that they invest your money. Some big funds don’t do this because they have enough money coming in from all sources to pay the pensions that they have to pay without getting into investments. From the investment or by other means, the insurance company or other pension provider will pay you your annuity, the monthly sum. When you die, they stop paying the monthly sum and keep all of pension pot, without having to pay out any more to you. If you die quickly, they make a profit. If you don’t die for a long time, they lose. Because they are working with many different people, they plan it so that, on average, they gain more than they lose. This gives them their profit, or, if they are not profit-making, the financial flexibility to cope with unexpected events.

Types of annuity

Now then, different types of annuity. You buy a single life annuity to provide a pension for just one person. If you were a single person, you would buy a single life annuity on your own life. The money would keep coming until you died. The alternative is to buy a joint life annuity to cover two people (or more if you’re living in a ménage-á-trois). If you are married or in a relationship, you might buy a joint life annuity. The money would keep on coming until both of you had died; it might be organised so that it reduces when the first person dies.

There is a certain amount of choice about this. For example, take a marriage where one partner (Partner A) has a very big pension pot but the other partner (Partner B) has a very small pot. Big-pot Partner A might buy a joint life annuity, and Little-pot Partner B a single life annuity. This is because Little-pot Partner B will get more while he/she is alive, because there is no need to keep money invested to pay an annuity after his/her death to big-pot Partner A; Partner A will still have a bigger annuity from his/her own big pot. Because Big-pot Partner A is going to be providing the bigger annuity, the couple will need this to cover both of them for the whole of their lives, whichever dies first. Big-pot Partner A won’t miss the annuity from the little pot, if little-pot Partner B dies first. However, little-pot Partner B would certainly miss the big annuity if big-pot Partner A dies first and the annuity was only on Partner A’s life.

You can vary both types of annuity with extra choices. If you buy a level lifetime annuity, you get the same amount of money every month for life. If you buy an escalating lifetime annuity, the amount of money is less than you get with a level annuity, but what you get goes up every year. The main reason for this is to take account of inflation. It might rise in line with inflation or by some agreed amount, say 3%. Some annuities also have a guarantee period. This means you get a payment for an agreed period, perhaps five years. This means you don’t lose everything to the insurance company if you die the day after buying your annuity. These extra choices cost money from the pot. So having an escalating annuity will add to the cost, and so will a guarantee.

The insurance company also has choices. If they think you are likely to die early (for example if you smoke, if you are fat or if you are ill), they will offer you a bigger annuity for the same size of pot. There is an advantage to you, therefore, if you can persuade the company that you are likely to have a short life, because you will get a better income from your annuity. Tell them how sick, greedy and addicted you are.

Do you take it when you can, or are you canny about when you take it?

There are more choices. Even though there is a state retirement age (it used to be 65 for men and 60 for women, but it’s rising for women to equalise the age and then going to rise for everyone), you don’t have to retire, or take the state pension or any other pension at that age. You can choose. For example, if you plan to carry on working after retirement age, you can delay taking your pension.

You can find out what age you have to retire with the government state pension calculator: on the internet here:

The calculator for women’s equalisation: http://pensions-service.direct.gov.uk/en/state-pension-age-calculator/home.asp

The calculator for the new government proposals: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/SpendingReview/DG_192159

If you do this, you will eventually get a bigger state pension and annuity. This is because you may have put more money into your pension pot, because you have worked and paid contributions for longer. Then, because the insurance company, or other pension provider, have had the money invested for longer, they should have made more money to put into the pension pot. Another point is that you will be nearer death, so the period the company has to pay you your annuity will be shorter. Your pension pot will therefore buy you a bigger annuity from the start.

However, you run a risk, too. If you delay taking your pension and you die soon after you take it, you get less money in total than you would if you had taken it at the earliest possible moment. So delaying may mean that you (and your wife or partner) lose. Working in a hospice, I have met people who left it too late to claim their pension and never got anything back because they died so quickly.

The ‘requirement to annuitise’

How have the government dealt with this?

First, there has been since 1921 a ‘requirement to annuitise’. That means that the government insists that you must buy an annuity with a pension pot. You are not allowed to take the pot and spend it how you like. This is for two reasons. One reason is that if you spend all your own money, you might fall back on social security and cost the government more money than it would have had to spend if you had bought an annuity.  The second reason is that the government gives us tax relief in the accumulation phase, to help us build up a pension pot faster. More than half of most pension pots is tax payments from the government. So if it’s being generous about that, it wants to be sure that its generosity is used in the right way when it gets to decumulation.

However, over the years the government has become more flexible about that. You could delay taking your pension until you are 75 under the former Labour government, and the present coalition wants to remove the requirement to buy an annuity, but you have to use your pension pot to buy one of various substitutes for a pension. These substitutes provide for alternative ways of taking part of the pension pot as income, while leaving some of it invested for later.

A point that ministers have made is that the whole purpose of the system is to provide you with a guaranteed income in retirement until you die, and annuities are perfectly designed to do that. The problem with more flexible arrangements is that you might make a miscalculation, or something will go wrong in the investment market, or you might live longer than you think. So, again, there is a risk that by any other arrangement than an annuity you might run out of money.

And remember, there is the risk the other way round. You might leave it too long and lose some or all of your money because you die before you can make use of it.

In reality, 95% of people do not delay all that long: they have taken their pension pot as an annuity by the time they are 70 years old. However, a few people (there are always some) are looking for more flexibility; these are usually people who are investment savvy and have a lot of money. Labour Party ministers, when they were in power, were not particularly keen to allow them to benefit from tax relief on their contributions to pensions and then play around with the money to make profits. Since in most cases more than half of pension pots are tax relief, why should we all pay tax relief to allow rich people to have more richesses to play around with?

The Conservatives who are now in power as part of the coalition with the LibDems are happier to allow people ‘choice’ that benefits them, rather than making them take part in the same pool of risk as the rest of us and thereby reduce our payments – remember all of this is an insurance scheme which works on averages, so one person’s gain is inevitably another person’s loss. Having more of these rich and flexible people in more general schemes would give all of us more flexibility; they would, as they would see it, be donating their flexibility to us.

The political issue

The difference on how much flexibility there should be is mainly one of political philosophy. The Labour philosophy is ‘cooperate and share’, the Conservative philosophy is ‘do-it-yourself’. So the Conservatives are always keener to encourage people to do their own thing. They argue that this is partly a matter of personal freedom, that the state should not limit people’s freedom to do what they like with their own money. But it also connects with their economic philosophy – liberalism. This argues that if you leave people as free as possible in a market to do what they want, the individual decisions that people make, when added together, almost always lead to more economic growth and more flexibility in the economy. Labour, or social democratic philosophy, argues that this is nevertheless unfair because some people are freer than others, either because they have more money to start with or because they have greater knowledge of how the market works, so they have an advantage. So they would argue for the system to be planned and regulated so that the advantages of the rich, well-informed (or well-advised) and flexible don’t get out of hand.

Pensions form one of the areas where the ‘cooperate and share’ approach of Labour is particularly relevant, because as with all insurance schemes, the larger they are the better they can accommodate outrageous (mis)fortune, and provide some resources that benefit the poorest.

On the other hand, you can understand those who are frustrated by the inflexibility that sometimes comes out of rules and regulations. A case in point is the problem with annuities, which is leading people to argue against the requirement to annuitise.

To understand why this is a problem, you have to know a bit more about how the investment of your pension pot works. When the insurance company invests your money, it has to be sure that no matter what happens it has the money to pay out your monthly pension. It does this by buying very safe savings schemes, mainly relying on lending money to governments (these are called ‘gilts’, short for  ‘gilt-edged’ investments, that is very safe) or big corporations. When interest rates are low, as they are at the moment, you have to spend a lot of money to get an income. For example, suppose you invest £100,000. If interest rates are 5%, you will get £5000 per year. Interest rates now are much less than this: less than 1%. At 1%, you only get £1000 income per year. So you have to spend £500,000 to get the same income per year.

But that’s not the only factor. Gilts and similar schemes are traded. If lots of people want them, the price goes up but the interest rate still stays the same. So if your insurance company uses your £100,000 investment to buy gilts when they are popular, it might only be able to buy half the number that were possible some while ago. Therefore, going back to the example, you will only get the income of 5% on £50,000 worth of gilts (£2,500) and £500 if you buy gilts which give a 1% income.

The result of this (and various other complexities) is that you don’t get much back for an annuity at the moment, and if you are free to invest the money in different ways, you get a better income. But the higher the income you get, the riskier the investment. For example, we all know you can get a higher income from Greek government debt. The problem is that we all also know that the owners of Greek government debt have recently had to take a ‘haircut’. This means they have lost a lot of the money they invested in Greece. By making annuities very safe, the government and the insurance companies avoid this kind of thing, but safety means we don’t get much income.

The way the government is tackling this is the proposal to remove the requirement to annuitise. But if they do that, they not only have to stop people running out of money too soon, by capping how much they can spend each year, but they also need to stop people hanging on to their money in a pension pot, in the hope of passing it on to their heirs. The government does not give tax relief on pensions to help people pass on a big legacy to their children, so it proposes to tax pension pots that remain at the end of peoples’ lives to get back their tax relief.

However, for most people all this is a fuss about nothing. In 2009, the government estimated that only 1% of people who bought annuities had a large enough pension pot to go for more flexible investments. Professional opinion, reflected in a statement by the Pensions Policy Institute, suggests that while these changes will benefit a few rich people, most people who took advantage of the flexibility would have riskier pensions as a result.

Taking all of this together, I see most of the current fuss about pensions and the government’s reaction to it as leading to richer people doing better and most of us being more at risk. This is not only not good for most of us who are heading in the direction of getting pensions soon. It’s also a worry that as we baby boomers come up to retirement, more of us will be switching from the accumulation phase to decumulation. As a result, we will stop saving and start spending from our investments. This can only lead to a long-term downslide in the investments markets because we’re moving from making investments towards selling them. If a lot of people sell something that a lot of people have stopped buying, the price of what they’re selling goes down. So the investments that underlie our pensions are going to continue to decrease in value for the foreseeable future.And there will also be a further rise in the cost of gilts and a drop in the money we get from our annuities, because more of us will want to buy them. As we saw earlier, that means the price goes up and the income we get goes down.

If you haven’t got an index-linked pension, I suggest keeping working.

Telecare: sign language translator

I was taken by the press report of a company that has devised an app (a small application that can be be loaded onto your laptop, tablet or mobile phone) to interpret sign language, which will be available from the second half of 2013 (or later, if the release of most new things that are not actually functioning yet is anything to go by - and its creators seem to be a new small company so there's plenty to go wrong). You use the camera in your phone or other gadget to film the move by the sign language speaker and the app translates it into text. I hope it's better than the Google translations you can get on the web.


Portable Sign Language Translator info

But this does illustrate how important technology is going to be to enable all of us to cope with greater disability and illness in the future, when there's not much care around. It's called assistive technology, and will be one of the threads of this blog.

There's a similar gadget already available to help you learn sign language, that works the other way - you type in the word and it demonstrates the sign.

Training in sign language translation gadget

More on assistive technology in general from Wikipedia: Wikipedia on assistive technology

and Tunstall, a very big operator in assistive technology in the UK: Tunstall telehealth and telecare website.

Its site gives you an idea of what is available, but obviously if you were buying, you'd shop around.

Older people and cinema

To the local cinema (usually we can't find anything we want to watch - it's usually ghastly violent teenfodder) to see the 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'. I found it colourful, amusing and sympathetic to older people having a good time in later life, and resolving their life tasks in new ways. It's had such poor reviews that the publicity has resorted to ordinary people saying they liked it. Perhaps the reviewers like the teenfodder.

Or perhaps not, because the Guardian (is it responding to its readership demographic?) has been going on about older people being poorly represented in film, but also rescuing the film industry, because there are more of them who are willing to spend money going to the cinema. Also, they like films about character and these are cheaper than the teen preference for fantasy epics.

The Guardian on older people being poorly represented in film
The Guardian on older people rescuing the cinema

The poorly represented argument suggests that the 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' represents older people as sick, doddery incompetents who don't know the difference between wi-fi and wireless. Well actually, according to Wikipedia, the wi in wifi means wireless and Wikipedia does not tell us that the fi means anything, so I think it is not an unreasonable question. And they have some illnesses and disabilities, but manage and overcome them well. They have a good time and they achieve their life aims in the film. That's probably unrealistic, but, hey, it's the pictures. We go for fun.

 Wikipedia on wifi

Actually BEMH is a romcom which is no better or worse than most romcom, but perhaps the Guardian writers do not want older people having rom. The people are no more caricatured than the teenagers are in teen films or younger people in romcoms for other agegroups.

And as far as rescuing the cinema is concenred, I also like drama, thrillers and science fiction. But I do not like earcracking sound, violence and extreme bad language. I've recently watched (on telly) some of the superhero films that have been coming out recently, but how are they exciting when the superhero always wins and the criminals are total caricatures?

A 1950s older persons sheltered housing scheme

Sharlston, West Yorkshire, 1950s older persons sheltered housing scheme in the context of council housing; picture taken in 1976.

Substance abuse among older adults

 According to the recent article, in the US there are '...78 million baby boomers nationwide, and estimates are that a boomer turns 50 every seven seconds. And many of these boomers are taking the abuse of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other illicit drugs into their “golden years.”' But alcohol still wins out, apparently.

Article on Substance Abuse by Older Adults

Watermen's Cottages Penge

A memorial to watermen who lost their lives in the great war.

A concert with walking aids

To a concert at the Fairfield Hall, Croydon; we have a season ticket.

We always feel young when we go to these concerts; not only because of the bravely unrevised 1950s style of the building inside and out. Croydon tries to jazz it up with blue and purple floodlighting, and the foyer has been given a wavy white ceiling. Also, the unappealing 50s slab of Croydon College next door has recently been graced with a curvilinear addition, outlined in blue neon, but it doesn't help Croydon town centre, a desert of commercial tower blocks. They actually announce at the station that it is the home of Nestle, which occupies one of the tower blocks  opposite the Halls across the dual carriageway. I presume Nestle pays for this privilege, but I'd keep quiet about it if I was them - a good target for the occupy movement.

No, our rejuvenation arises from the age of the clientele for these concerts, we are often among the youngest, I presume because unlike any other place in which I have regularly been to orchestral concerts, Croydon has no school of music, so there are no students, and most of the orchestra can give the audience two generations in age. The array of walking aids would not disgrace a disabled living centre; in fact it's great to know that one will still want and be able take in a concert in the decades to come. Although it's worrying that the champagne bar achieves very little custom - possibly the trendy high seats are a little ambitious given the age of the clientele.

The audience is a bit depleted, possibly because the programme contains a 'world premiere' - that means modern music, although, since this is the London Mozart Players, the programme has been carefully balanced with an early Mozart symphony. However, this was one that Mozart was probably hoping everyone would forget, the likely fate of the world premiere piece, I fancy. The gem of the evening was a spirited rendition of Richard Strauss's suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, played with precision, as always when Gerard Korsten conducts. I've never heard it before: great fun.

Govt bereavement research fails to consider older people because social security is no longer social

The government is going through a consultation about bereavement benefits at the moment (you have to reply by the 5th March): here is the document on the web: Government consultation on bereavement benefit.

They have also published some research which, from the point of greying people, is a bit disappointing. The crucial cut-off date is age 45, because the state bereavement allowance is only paid for a year if you are bereaved from that age up to state pension age (unless you have children when you are bereaved, in which case you you get an extra allowance while you are getting child benefit for them).

The research can be downloaded from here: DWP bereavement research site
and the pdf here: Qualitative study of the effects of bereavement benefits
and a more detailed summary and comment on my Social Care/Palliative Care blog: Blog post on bereavement benefit research

All of this is being done by the Department of Work and Pensions, the fiefdom of Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith, although obviously bereavement is so unimportant it's actually being handled by their House of Lords Minister, Lord Freud. I'm not a fan of the way the DWP is organised, because its main focus is on reducing the financial cost of social security, rather than examining the state's social responsibility for our citizens. At least when it was the Department of Health and Social Security, it was tied up with a secretary of state who had responsibility for social and health care, and who therefore had to look at the broader social and health consequences of of what it was doing with social security. The current DWP is mainly concerned with social security in relation to work.

The consequence of this limited perspective is in general that older people are seen as an expense because they don't work (and therefore don't pay taxes and cost the state money) and, in this instance, you can see it in the atttitude to bereavement benefits, which are mainly about helping young people to cope with the practical consequences of a sudden reduction in income and increase in expenses. This research, unnecessarily it seems to me, spends some time looking at whether bereavement benefits are a disincentive to work (and finds that they are not), whether they are too much (no, although useful in coping with the financial consequences of bereavement, they're too little) and how you can help people make a transition to work.

The researchers find, for example, that the emotional consequences of a bereavement are sometimes a factor in being able to manage on a suddenly depleted income and that inflexible employers make it more difficult for people to stay at work if they're caring for a dying partner or coping with bereavement. Moreover, the short-term contract culture, in which the economy tries to make as many employees as possible temporary, makes it much more dificult for people to stay in work and cope with bereavement and to get back to work when they are bereaved.

So, here is a little bit of information that inflexible and cheapskate employment arrangements are adding to the distress of bereavement and making it more difficult for people to care for sick partners and cope with their bereavement. Are there any suggestions for dealing with (or researching further into) these broader social issues? No, because the DWP doesn't have broad social concerns, its job is only to explore (and under the present government in its present economic situation if possible reduce) benefits payments.

And because it is thinking about those benefits only in relation ot people of working age, it is not looking at the possibility that older bereaved people, retired and without children, might also need financial help to deal with some of the emotional and practical consequences of bereavement. In passing, the researchers note people appreciated it when the state gives them a regular payment to help them through a difficult patch in their lives. They also note that some people resented the fact that the benefits are short-term and related to bereavement and child care: they do not provide official recognition of the important social role of being widowed, as the old widows pension used to.

This is a good example of how the state recognising and helping with the troubled times in people's lives is a possibly intangible but very worthwhile role of government  action. Social security is not only about bits of money, important though that is when you're on the edge financially, but it is social: it shows in a very clear way that the people around you recognise and maintain their solidarity and connection with us in our shared social life and experience. I can't help feeling that politicians,civil servants and economists recognising that support and conection with citizens is a very important function of government might make them all a bit more popular and well-thought-of.

Economical, interesting tips and the feminism of class division

With Margaret for dinner at the Savoy; it's a birthday treat, and is because she found out from our minister (of religion, not our MP who is a minister of state) that it is economical (relatively - at least economical enough for a minister of religion to be seen doing) to go to the Savoy River Restaurant at 5.30pm for the pre-theatre menu (but if you're really being cheap don't have the wine, which is an astronomical price, and they will give you free tap water if you ask). This is my living economically tip for any older readers of this blog whose pension has been defenestrated.

Then to The Pitman Painters, in its last few weeks at the Duchess Theatre. It's by Lee Hall, the author of Billy Elliott, and it was at the National and on Broadway a few years ago having started out at The Live theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It's about a group of miners in the '30s who hire (through the WEA) a lecturer on art, who decides doing is better than seeing. They became quite famous as the Ashington Group of artists, and there is a gallery in a mining museum in Northumberland, not far from Morpeth.

The website of the Woodhorn Colliery Museum: http://www.ashingtongroup.co.uk/home.html (This is my interesting things to do tip for any older readers of this blog who happen to go that far north).

The play is funny and well performed, but there's a political point too. The final scene is just before the nationalisation of the coal industry; scenes of jubilation etc, and positive mention of the wonders of the National Health Service, soon to come into being. A few points were also made about the complete loss of the coal industry in the 1980s. I wonder what the plays of the future will say about the current NHS reform?

Margaret, who is always suspicious about my lack of feminist social awareness in doing more or less anything, but particularly in selecting her celebratory entertainment, asks, as she settles into her seat: 'Has it only got men?' I count the cast list, and it turns out there are three female characters, played by two actresses. One actress, it turns out, plays a working class woman in the first act and (tastefully) takes her clothes off to general consternation among the more respectable miners, while one plays an aristocrat, who doesn't (and in fact has a sequence of quite elegant period-style gowns). There must be a message about class division there, too.

A dementia play: forget it

Rehearsals for Easter Experience this year (a play telling the Easter story acted out for local school children). We are at the stage of having put away scripts but not having quite learned the words. I am giving my Peter the disciple this year for the first time.
 We fantasise it would be better as a dementia play: 'I'm not quite sure why I'm here, what is he doing? what am I supposed to be saying?'