Budget,Women Pensioners Wont Get Rebate

antenna

Women pensioners aged between 60 and 65 will not get the 200 pound council tax rebate............to make it clearer...where the women is widowed or single and a pensioner,or where the woman is a pensioner under 65 and her husband is not over 65 they will not get the 200 pound rebate.This is discrimination against women......is this legal,.............

dunstonh

Womans retirement age is now 65. Yes, some may still be in that interim period of phased increase but 65 is now the age.

It would be discrimination if women got it earlier than men.

antenna

dunstonh wrote:

Womans retirement age is now 65. Yes, some may still be in that interim period of phased increase but 65 is now the age.

It would be discrimination if women got it earlier than men.

I
I think you should check your facts before making statements like that.Women aged sixty are retiring and collecting the government pension.All women aged 60 can collect their pension,where do you get "some may still be in that interim period" from.

dunstonh

The womens retirement age was increased to 65 a couple of years back. Those already collecting it were exempt from the change and there is a phased retirement age based on date of birth.

If you are a woman born on or before 5 April 1950, you can get your State Pension from the age of 60. If you are a woman born on or after 6 April 1955, you can get your State Pension from the age of 65. If you are a woman born between 6 April 1950 and 5 April 1955, you can get your State Pension when you reach State Pension age. This will be between 60 and 65, depending on your date of birth.

So its only fair that women over 65 benefit. To do women at 60 and men at 65 would be discrimination against men

nearlyrich

Nobody told me when I joined the NI system that they could change my retirement date without my consent. If it was an insurance company that sold a policy then changed the date of benfit diatribution there would be a public outcry.

margaretclare

I agree with much that dunstonh says. If you're only 60 or at least below 65, whether you're single, widowed or divorced shouldn't matter. Treating men less favourably i.e. giving a rebate to a woman aged 60 but not to a man aged 60, would be discrimination. It cuts both ways!

Assuming you're still in reasonable health, you could still work. You have a life expectancy of another 20 - 30 years, maybe longer. What plans have you got? How are you going to prepare for those years?

I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but when I was 60, widowed when I was only 57, it never occurred to me not to work. I did all kinds of jobs just to keep the roof above my head - widowhood coincided with redundancy and my late husband had no life assurance (he 'hadn't believed in it') so either I worked to pay the mortgage or I faced being made homeless. In fact I worked until I was 67. I'm still paying into a stakeholder because I reckon that by the time I'm 75 in 2010 we might be glad of a little bit extra (I'm happily in a new marriage).

Council tax rebate - I don't need it. Our council tax is going up from £91 a month to £94 a month - no big deal. Free bus passes - we never use the bus. I couldn't walk as far as the bus stop at the top of our road - the car is my lifeline. Free TV licence when we're 75 - again, we spend more time on the Internet than we do watching TV, especially now we're on broadband. Winter fuel payment - again, I don't need it. Who supposes that we buy our winter fuel in November, just as if we were filling the cellar with coal? I pay £30 a month all year round for our gas heating.

I don't like the 'one size fits all' attitude to older people. We are not all alike. I guess the stereotype is that we still catch the bus to go into town to cash pensions weekly, that we spend all day watching TV, those kind of things. I am afraid that I don't feel to have very much in common with my own age-group. I can't believe the whingeing that goes on. The poorest of us is far, far better off than the majority of people throughout the world.

My greatest delight today was the sunshine, the first bumblebee, and seeing frogs in my garden pond (which we had made for us last October). The pond cost just the same as another week's holiday, but we thought it would give us more long-term pleasure and delight. And so it is. We went away on holiday to celebrate our 3rd wedding anniversary in January, but there's no point in going again until I get this hip sorted out, which won't be until November I've been told. Can't walk anywhere - no point in going away, although there are lots of lovely places we haven't seen together.

I campaigned for years to get women treated equally with men. For several years now it hasn't been possible to force a woman to retire until she's 65, equal with a man. This gives you more time to build up a pension entitlement in your own right. It was a speech therapist in the NHS who successfully fought that battle, back in the 1980s. One of my pet projects was equal tax treatment of men and women, and I spoke to the then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, in the mid-1980s. We now have the married people's tax allowance split between the two of us. No one has mentioned the fact that tax allowances for the over-65s are going up quite considerably. I'm pleased about that, because it means we'll pay a lot less tax in the coming year, maybe no tax at all.

It used to be assumed that women had to be supported by a man, but that's no longer the case, thank goodness! We can't go backwards now.

Margaret

antenna

My main point is that in his budget speech he said all pensioners over the age of 65 will get a 200 pounds per household rebate on the council tax,but not everybody watched the budget speech either live or recorded highlights,but every news report mentioned that PENSIONERS would get the rebate.Women for the last 40 or so years and for the next 10 years will become pensioners at 60,and as for the un-fairness, women work harder than men (in my opinion) and i am a man! and deserve to get their pension at 60,but can work on if they choose.

Pal

Welcome to the wonderful world of news and current affairs reporting.

While I have no doubt that many women work harder than some men, there are no doubt many cases where the opposite applies. Irrespective, benefit entitlements are always based on ages rather than how hard people may or may not have worked, and it is illegal to discriminate between the sexes based on age. The transition of retirement ages from 60 to 65 over a period is of benefit to those women who can benefit from it while it still applies.

Of course, these women could defer receiving their state pension until they are 65, which would result in their recieving a larger state pension than a man the same age and being entitled to exactly the same council tax rebate benefits.

Spendless

The winter fuel allowance is paid to all people over 60.

I don't see why the same couldn't have applied here.

dunstonh

Well, giving it to over 65s cost 800 million. It would probably cost another 200 million to include over 60s.

Cheap gimmick to win votes and shouldnt be allowed. A longer term solution would have been better rather than this.

Spendless

I agree that it's a cheap gimmick to win votes and i hope all those that fall into the pensioner but don't get the money cos they're under 65 remember it.


Just like i will remember that the fantastic speech about the amount being given to child tax credits does not include the likes of me that only receives the family element.