Natalie Bennett delivers speech to National Pensioners' Convention

17 June 2015

On Tuesday 16 June, Natalie Bennett delivered a speech at the National Pensioners' Convention's Pensioners' Parliament.

Bennett said:

"The last time I was speaking to a pensioner group was before the election. It was the Age UK rally, and earlier that morning the group had shown that what the Women's Institute could do, they could do better. They'd booed, heckled and generally given David Cameron a torrid time on many issues including the NHS and social care.

They were of course right!

I wasn't worried, however, because I knew that many would already know, and the rest soon would, that on the NHS the Green Party has a clear (and very popular) principle – the profit motive has no place in healthcare.

And on social care that we were presenting a fully costed plan to provide free social care for all who needed it.  That would end the disgrace of 800,000 of the 2 milllion over 65s who need social care and aren't getting it.

But what I wanted to focus on today was not the NHS – as pressing an issue as the continuing race to privatise it is -- but the actual, day-to-day situation of too many pensioners in Britain – the nearly 1 in 6 who are living in poverty.

When the figures for pensioner poverty came out last year, there were two sets of reactions to the same figures. Some said isn't it great? The figures are down – _only_ 16% of pensioners are living in poverty.

Others, and I'd put myself and the Green Party collectively among them, said "that's a disgrace – 1.7 million pensioners living in poverty".

It was a view supported when the International Longevity Centre conducted a comparative study, seeing how British pensioners were doing compared to their compatriots around Europe.

It mightn't surprise you to know that the answer was "poorly". The levels of relative poverty among pensioners were lower in Romania, Latvia, Germany, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Ireland, France, Norway, Slovakia, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Netherlands. (http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/527544/British-pensioner-poverty-EU-worst).

Behind this is a level of basic state pension that's low in international comparisons – just 32% of the average wage – and is based on a reliance on private pensions that works well for the few – as do so many of our policies – and not for many. Consider that 42% of adults have no private pension provision – and the insecure, low-wage nature of so many jobs now is only likely to worsen that situation.

Indeed, the "Age Audit" that you conducted for this conference showed almost 40% of those aged 65 and over in the UK experienced poverty at least once between 2010 and 2013, compared with around 30% of those under 65.http://npcuk.org/1989

During the recently concluded election campaign, the Green Party

was calling for what we dubbed a "citizens' pension" – a basic state pension paid to all, set at a level that ensure, by definition, no pensioner was living in poverty. That is currently calculated at £180 for singles, £310 for couples.

I want to restate that call today.

We know that other political parties are keen to appeal to the pensioner vote – we know that the Labour Party contenders currently vying for the leadership are keen to get the votes of older people – so here's a great opportunity.

Commit to zero pensioner poverty, and you'll be both doing the right thing, and putting yourself in a prime electoral position.

A lot of discussion about the state of Britain today has – rightly – focused on the young. We're about to see new child poverty figures that will be presenting a depressing picture of start in life we're going children who have no say at all in their circumstances – consider that a judge has ruled that the benefit cap puts us in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

There's been a general view – and there's some truth in it – that comparative voting levels among the young and the old have translated to comparative levels of policy attention and care.

But it's critically important that this isn't set up as a competition between generations. No one would win from that.

I sometimes talk to anti-cuts campaigners who are tempted to enter such a competition – "don't cut our library, the one over there is less important so it should be cut instead". And when you're desperate to save an essential service for your local community, that's an understandable impulse. But it is one that has to be resisted.

We'll all benefit from a healthy society that ensure everyone has the resources for a decent quality of life. We all suffer if some _other_ group suffers.

Older people not only won't have to worry about their grandchildren, they'll be assured that the young are being educated and prepared for productive lives – some of them in the essential medical and care professions that the older people may someday need.

Young people will be older one day, and they can benefit from an assurance of future security, to enable them to make good choices in their life.

People in the middle – well if there was adequate care provision, incomes, support for the young and the old – they'd be less trapped as the sandwich generation, trying to fill the gaps of state provision.

There's not a competition between generations here, there's a competition between the 1% of the wealthiest individuals and the rest of us. It's a competition we need to win".

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