Here we need to take a step back and ask what commissions (let alone the uncommissioned reports that appear every month) are designed to do. 15 million, about of us aren’t ready to retire when we reach our “state pension age”. Most of us that with older ages come bills that are not pleasant, the bills to pay for social care. That older people care that they are not a liability to others is obvious.
Commercial daytime television is paid for by adverts focussing on older folk and their paranoia that they will leave a funeral bill to their bereaved family. Of course the funeral is the least of the financial problems old folk face but it’s the one that can be sold on TV.
Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone’s children would probably be watching adverts for old folks and thinking the same thought that Fred is thinking.
“Why isn’t someone taking care of my later life for all the taxes that I pay?”.
We all know that there is a problem with growing old and that it is largely financial. The NHS was not built to deal with old age as we experience it today, any more than our pension system was designed for the length we live or our stock of housing for the changes in demand from those living far from “virtually”!
This is not a blog about how we chaps and chapesses push pens about to find ways for Fred Flintstone to lay down his spade. It is just to have a laugh to pretend we can find answers to the huge problems of getting old without solutions we all sign up to.
This is really what we want from Government, not rival systems that change every time a new group comes to power but which is driven to find problems for folks like Fred and Barney and voted for by those very people.
So far we have failed to get solutions for housing and health and a replacement wage in retirement which we feel comfortable with . We have a Commission on how we can look after elderly people’s needs for social care and we have a Commission on how we will get people a decent wage in later years. We have begun to think again about housing (I see Andy Haldane is making some suggestions today)
These are the big three issues for those of us who are “in decumulation” as people with pens call growing old. We cannot have us on the “sell-side” determining the answers to Government’s problems. Instead it must be those who represent Fred and Barney. I mean the people they vote for, the people who they pay their workplace taxes to. We do need an answer to Fred’s question.