Pensioner poverty, we are often led to believe, is a thing of the past. Apparently, the Baby Boomer generation has been so successful at defending its interests that the greedy old buggers are raking it in. It is claimed that we live in a ‘retirement aristocracy’. Pensioners spend their days jetting off on holiday or sauntering around the golf course. They are sitting pretty in their oversized, overpriced homes. Meanwhile, younger generations are said to be miserably stuck at the bottom of the ladder, condemned to work forever to prop up the living standards of an ageing population. As debates about economic and social problems become increasingly framed by the divisive narrative of ‘generational inequality’, such crass assumptions about the causes and consequences of the British pensions crisis are widespread. They underpin the view that we should stop worrying about pensioner poverty, and perhaps policymakers should even find ways of cutting back on benefits and entitlements for the elderly, clawing back some of the wealth they have supposedly stolen from future generations. This penny-pinching approach allows policymakers to evade the big questions over what to do about pensions, and to ignore the inequalities of wealth and income within the retired population.

At the European Sociology Association conference last month, Professor Bernhard Ebbinghaus of the University of Oxford warned that the proportion of elderly people living in severe poverty in the UK (defined here as having an income of 40 per cent or less of the median average) has risen from around one per cent in the mid-1980s to around five per cent today. This, he argued, is the largest increase among western European countries. He attributes it to Britain’s ‘Beveridge-lite’ state-pension system, which has ‘rather ungenerous basic pensions with means-tested supplements’. This ‘reproduces relatively high severe poverty rates among the elderly’. Even when private pensions were taken into account, Ebbinghaus said: ‘The public-private mix puts many elderly at risk as they lack sufficient supplementary earnings-related pensions.’

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