Pensions and Benefits

	Benefit payments, excluding pensions, absorb nearly £100 billion per year or 20% of the national budget. Most of the hundreds of available benefits discourage work, saving, help within the family and within the community.
But while the benefit system urgently needs reform, our pensions arrangements are in crisis. As life expectancies steadily increase and birth rates drop, it is inevitable that an ever larger portion of our population is elderly. This leaves fewer workers for each retired person, meaning Britain and almost all other developed countries face the risk that government and public sector pensions could collapse our economy unless pensions are reformed or taxes are increased. Promises by politicians have led people to expect that their state pensions will be higher than can reasonably be provided. Backed into a corner of its own making, the current government now tops up the basic state pension with an additional means-tested 'pension credit' and gimmicks such as the winter fuel allowance and free bus rides.
Topic Links www.pensionguide.gov.uk
Our Policies 1a. Long term solutions to a long term problem. We believe that the process of reforming pensions is a long term project which cannot be easily fixed with short-term solutions such as immigration, which we reject outright. Immigrants themselves grow older, and to maintain the present population of working age to pensioners we would require over 1 million immigrants a year up to 2050. That would double Britain's population - the third most densely populated country in the EU - to 120 million and leave us with exactly the same problem. First of all we will restore tax exemption and increase security for private pensions, because we believe it is vital that confidence is restored in these schemes. This will encourage more people to plan for their future. Furthermore we will offer incentives to individuals and employers for supporting private pension schemes, and in addition to this our policy to reform council tax would already ensure that pensioners enjoy lower bills during retirement. As with the NHS we believe that those with the greatest health and wealth can share the benefits of their good fortune with those who are not so fortunate. Therefore we will use the £4.5bn created from our high earners tax, in addition to £3bn of our EU surplus to affect an immediate rise in the state pension. We will also seek to offer more generous rewards to those who choose to defer their state pension 1b. An end to the pension apartheid. We believe that pensions in government and the public sector are vital to reforms, and find the current two tier class system with a massive gap of 8 years between retirement in the public and private sector to be unacceptable. Our pension reforms will be based on fairness and equality with a universal retirement age. We will introduce realistic caps on public sector pension schemes to ensure that they are sustainable in the future. In addition to this we will seek to link retirement ages for all sectors to national life expectancy figures, which at present would mean gradual increases in the retirement age. We will use a 20 year transition lead in before anyone is affected.
2. Rewarding hard-working Britons. We will impose much tighter control over eligibility for the State Second Pension, to ensure that people who have led long hard-working lives are rewarded in their retirement, whilst those who have spent years claiming unemployment benefits settle for the basic state pension. Although we recognise that some means testing is necessary - in order to accurately assess eligibility by quantifying the party's income, assets, and earnings - we believe that this method requires serious deregulation and increased transparency. By achieving this we will considerably cut excessive administration costs.
3. Simplifying an over-complicated benefits system. Most of the hundreds of benefits currently available in the UK are over-complicated, discourage work, saving and help within the family and local communities. Reforms in the present system are essential but successive governments have avoided welfare reform because of the large numbers of voters who receive payments, and because an increasing amount of our social law is driven by the EU. Our ultimate goal in reforming benefits will be to pave the way for a simplified benefits system which effectively supports people back to work, and provides a decent income for those times when work is not possible due to sickness or disability. We believe that the key to success will be a system that provides tailored packages of support designed to meet individuals' needs.
4. Massive cuts in benefits to asylum seekers and immigrants. Under the present government the welfare state has been overly expanded to provide a large number of people indiscriminately with more money than the country can afford, meaning higher taxes. And by providing dependants with a similar level of income to the minimum wage, benefits fraud and economic inactivity is encouraged. The UK has become a soft touch under Labour and this is reflected in immigration that has reached 342,000 a year, far higher than at any time in our history. We believe that large-scale cuts in benefits available to both legal and illegal immigrants will not only save the British taxpayer millions per year, but also help to alleviate the present asylum and immigration crisis.
5. Helping capable people back to work. Reforms in incapacity benefits are a vital response to demographic change and increased life expectancy as 50% of the 2.7 million on IB are over 50. However we cannot use IB as a surrogate form of early retirement. The majority of those on IB want to return to employment as soon as is possible. But they need to be helped and supported, not goaded and ultimately forced to return to work before they are ready to do so. Simply causing them further financial worries is not going to help them. We believe the best way forward is to involve employers in the process because they have a vital role in ensuring reforms are successful. Employer preconceptions about both disability and age are deep rooted, and government action to end labour market discrimination will ensure that reforms are sustainable and constructive.