LABOUR REPRESENTATION COMMITTEE
Chair: John McDonnell MP
Vice Chairs: Maria Exall, Christine Shawcroft
Secretary: Simeon Andrews
Treasurer: Graham Bash

Pensions crisis...a crisis of redistribution not of demography

The LRC welcomes the Turner Commission support for the restoration of the link with earnings. This is a step that the labour movement has long supported and is official Labour Party policy, as overwhelmingly endorsed at Party Conference 2005.

However the Commission's report offers nothing for today's pensioners, too many of whom are already left to rely on inadequate means-tested benefits. And, it is not acceptable to force workers to work until they drop for their basic state pension - for which they have saved all their lives on the understanding that they would receive it at 65.

John McDonnell MP, Chair of the Labour Representation Committee, said:

“Restoring the link between pensions and earnings and increases in the basic state pension are steps in the right direction, but an increasing the retirement age is unacceptable.

When in some of the UK's poorest areas average life expectancy is only 69, this is an gross insult to the poor who rely on state provision.”

Bryn Davies, Director of Union Pension Services, said:

“There is no dispute that the UK faces a pensions crisis. But it is not a crisis caused by people living longer or retiring too early, or even one of an insupportable State pensions burden.

The UK has made massive gains in productivity and efficiency to become the fourth largest economy in the World. The Pensions crisis comes not from a lack of resources but from a misallocation of the wealth of this country.”

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