THE POVERTY OF OLDER PEOPLE IN THE UK

Abstract

The quality of life of older people is markedly affected by their material resources and experience of income poverty. In 1997, almost a third of those past state pension age in the UK lived in poverty. Changes to benefits and payments to older people since the advent of a Labour government have on some measures reduced these poverty rates significantly. This article critically examines this claim, posing three substantive questions: what do these measurements of poverty rates among older people mean, who are the disadvantaged in old age, and what might the future of poverty in old age look like? Poverty rates are extremely sensitive to the measures used, and particular problems for older people such as depth of poverty and persistent poverty are disguised by headcount poverty rates. Among older people, gender, social class, age and marital status are important determinants of poverty. Following the Pensions Commission's report in November 2005, the government will introduce pension reforms that will have some impact on pensioner poverty decades in the future, but will have almost no impact on current pensioners, and little impact on those who will shortly become pensioners. Older people are institutionally marginalised in these reforms. Material disadvantage accumulates not only through socio‐economic correlates and life events, but also because of age, generation and cohort. The failure by the current Labour government to undertake paradigmatic reform of the pension system means that these problems will persist into the future.