Failing the pensions test

Polly Toynbee's partial reading of the research on take-up of means-tested benefits by pensioners does her little credit (Targets for pensions, September 22).

The government's pilot exercises to increase the take-up of income support among pensioners induced only one in seven of those contacted to make a claim (one in three of which were successful): 86% did not claim even when they knew about it. Only two-fifths of claims were from entitled non-recipients and three-fifths from people who were ineligible or not entitled. Pensioners told the pilot's evaluators that a more adequate retirement pension would remove the need for income support.

Means tests are deeply unpopular and not an effective solution to pensioner poverty.
Alan Walker

Professor of social policy, University of Sheffield



• Social insurance and means testing are both ways of redistributing resources, but in different ways. Social insurance mainly redistributes across life cycles, while means testing more directly targets resources to low-income groups. They are not "left" or "right", "good" or "bad", "new" or "old". Both are better at some things than others. The issue is what the balance should be in pension provision over the next couple of decades.

Thanks to the government's excellent management of the economy the prospects for public finances are better than for generations. As a result, re-indexing pensions to earnings is affordable. The government actuary's evidence to the social security select committee's report on pensioner poverty, published in August, was that this would require a 0.23% per annum increase in contributions over 60 years.

In my experience as a local councillor, the minimum income guarantee is not reaching enough of those who need it. Pensioners do not support means-tested benefits and do want re-indexation. It is wholly consistent with the principles on which New Labour has tried to govern to learn from experience, respond to their views and change policy to take account of them.
Steve Munby
Liverpool



• Payment of national insurance contributions entitles us to (among other things) the state pension. There has never, however, been any direct financial link between the amounts, and the government of the day has always determined its level. Pensions have in practice been paid out of current taxation.

Fifty years ago few pensioners had any other income, and the same state benefit for all was appropriate. Today there are huge variations in pensioner income, strongly correlated with age. Published figures show that 41% of pensioner couples are actually in the top half of the population income distribution. William Beveridge would never have suggested the same pension for all in today's situation.

Short of introducing age-related benefits, I believe that the government's broad strategy is correct. If more is to be spent, it would be ludicrous to pay it out equally to all, when so many over-80s still live in poverty. Far better to target those in real need, whatever Lady Castle may think.
Alan Pavelin
Chislehurst, Kent
alan@pavelin.fsnet.co.uk





• Polly Toynbee is absolutely right. Residual memories of the horrors of the means test in the 1920s have an enduring place in the collective consciousness of the Labour party but it is misleading to allow the whole principle of means testing to be tarred with the same brush.

I could hardly live on my state pension without housing and council tax benefit, but I regard these, like the pension itself, as a right, earned in my working years and see no reason to be deterred by any sense of hurt pride from letting the council know I am entitled to them.
Derek Fane
Bognor Regis, Sussex