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Posts tagged Retirement planning
Goodbye to urban paranoid
Mar 6th
Ian Whitwham on retiring to the seaside
A perfect stranger says: “Good morning.” My wife and I are walking down a country lane to the lonely sea and the sky. Our backyard. It’s just us now – after 28 years. We’ve not been long in rural heaven and are only slowly getting used to leaving London, the darling daughters and the working life. I don’t quite know where I live any more – the name of the place still looks like a line in an eye test. I still feel I’m on holiday in a kinder and gentler universe, in which we’re mugged by good manners.
“Good morning,” says another perfect stranger.
“What a lovely day,” says another.
You can get sectioned for this kind of thing down Ladbroke Grove. We say it back. Jill in a sort of Joyce Grenfell way. Me in a swallowing marbles sort of way. Jill slips easily into the pastoral groove. I’m still on Urban Paranoid. I can’t quite shed my inner inner-city thug and am tempted to respond: “Did I ask you?”
“Stop being a pillock and just join in. It’s common courtesy,” says Jill.
Indeed. It is a lovely day. Sun dances on waves, clouds zoom across skies, holly berries glow in mists, things go tweet. I unleash my Observer Book of Birds for the first time in 50 years. We pass honesty boxes for swelling gourds and homemade honey and elderberry soap. God’s in his heaven. I’m tempted to nick something.
Here comes another ruddy stranger. I get in first. “Good morning.”
“And good morning to you,” says a woman with the complexion of a Cox’s orange pippin. She’s surrounded by romping dogs. Will they eat me? It seems not. Pastoral canines don’t assault you or sever your tendons or attempt unsolicited carnal relations with your shins. Like their owners. They are not inner-city killers on a bit of string. They are lovely, furry, floppy things. We cross a field.
“Crumbs! Is that a bull?”
“Don’t know.”
“Is that a willy?”
“Don’t know.”
“Give it no eye contact.”
“Like the Central line.”
It seems to work. I’m getting there, getting more pastoralised.
The daughters’ absence is much tougher. You want them to go – but then you don’t. You don’t think you’ll miss their chirping, tedious, melodramatic racket – then you do. We keep a room for them. But they’re off to those big, infernal cities. Anna to London. Alice to New York. For a while, they pepper us with phone calls. But they soon get less frequent and more mercenary.
“Hi Dad! I’m under Manhattan bridge! I’ve dreamed of this and now I’m here! Gottahundreddollars? Taluvyabye!” goes Alice.
She’s in Brooklyn, teaching scallywags to read. I worry. She could have done that in Shepherds Bush.
“Hi Dad! I’ve just heard Patti Smith! Wehhh!! She’s God! You wouldn’t believe how …” she goes again.
“How much?”
“Two hundred would see me through, taluvyabye!”
“Hi Dad! I’m at the club where Dylan used to play. I was wondering if you could see your way to …”
“Hi Dad!” goes other, more mature daughter. “I’m a bit skint.”
“How much?” “A hundred! Pay you back! Taluvyabye!”
We do a swap. Her chums wear summer frocks in winter winds and acquire chest conditions. We leg it back to Ladbroke Grove. Wallop! Bright lights. Pandemonium. Shocking! I’ve gone a little pastoral. A cheerless hooded youth with those off-the-buttock threads pimp rolls towards me like Richard III.
“Good evening,” I say. I nod. He looks shocked and grunts, and seems to deem me sectionable. He has the city stare. I miss these foul manners. I’ll always have one foot in the Grove.
But Jill is in her element. She charges over cliffs in the bracing drizzle. She bakes things organic while trilling Dolly Parton. She sips mulled oblivion and reads James Lee Burke thrillers. She raids garden centres and lugs back flora and fauna and plants and vegetables and loads and loads of logs for the multi-fuel burner.
This has taken on near numinous significance in this Siberian winter. It has only three drawbacks. It doesn’t heat. It rarely lights. No matter. Jill will not be beaten. She’s become a crazed fire starter. She riddles ashes and draws flues, and has become a connoisseur of chimney pots. She feeds the thing paper, kindling and anthracite. Expert stuff. “Watch!” she says. I do. She ignites the beast. Flames blaze briefly, flutter and expire. She starts again and fails and blasphemes and starts and fails and blasphemes and cheats with petrol and it goes whoosh and nearly burns the place down and fades and is extinct. This takes its toll. Her complexion is a fine line between burnished and basted. And still the place is as chill as a morgue and I go to bed with a Stalingrad hat, seafaring woollies, and “professional” rambling socks. My circulation is shot and by dawn I’m convulsed with cramp. What’s so wrong with electricity?
I finally have a whole room to myself, a tiny sanctuary away from the world, where I can fail to write the great work and have a go at Middlemarch or Moby-Dick. I can finally play my rock’n'roll loud. “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!” goes Little Richard at the breaking waves. “Be Bop A Lula” goes sweet Gene Vincent at distant horizons. The local pub is magic and plays Creedence Clearwater Revival. I can get merry and have epiphanies. I can wander up to a church on a green hill. A little Larkin church with gravestones with names such as Ermyntrude and Florence. I can sit under a big yew tree and try to get deep and fail and still get annihilated by green thoughts in green shades. The world can go hang itself. It’s gone. Well, nearly.
Ring! Ring! “Hidadhowaryou?Gotafewdollars?Loveya!”
We finally get to the beach. Can you beat an empty English beach in winter? A pale sun shines through silver clouds on gunmetal waves. It’s fabulously bleak, exhilaratingly grim, like the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer. We plod along for miles. We often came here Before the Girls.
Before all that mature adult stuff. All that parenting stuff? Why did we take it so seriously?
And all that teaching stuff? All those lesson plans. All those bollocks workshops. All that marking. Jill could start so many fires with that. All those registers. All those names. All gone. Lost on these crashing waves.
We plod on for miles, take tea in the best cafe in the world – well, West Bexington. We forget the time. Darkness falls suddenly on us city fools. We can hardly see our hands. We grab each other’s. A moon comes out. It seems to snow across the silver sea. Sequins in falling light. Magic. As if we’ve just met. Like a first date. Can you have any more first dates? Can you have hot dates when you’re this old?
“We could go out dancing!”
“Won’t we be embarrassing?”
“Probably! Who’s watching?”
We stomp and giggle on the shingle. It’s just us now. Blimey. Hopefully for a long haul.
“You better be interesting,” says Jill. “Or I’m out of here.”
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Forced retirement increasing, says charity
Feb 25th
Charity survey reports: ‘Forced retirement has spiralled out of control as employers use low-cost shortcut to shed jobs’
More than 100,000 people were forced to retire against their will last year as employers used the default retirement age to cut back on jobs, according to Age Concern and Help the Aged.
The charity said its research suggested employers had used forced retirement as a cheap and easy alternative to redundancy during the recession.
Michelle Mitchell, Age Concern and Help the Aged Charity director, said: “Our survey clearly shows the use of forced retirement has spiralled out of control, offering some employers a low-cost shortcut to shed jobs during the recession.
“The default retirement age has stamped an expiry date on hundreds of thousands of older workers. It’s the most disturbing example of age discrimination which still tarnishes later life for so many people.”
The charity’s figure is four times higher than the number it expected to see when the default retirement age of 65 was first introduced in 2006.
However it said it expected the situation to get worse in the near future: some 530,000 workers aged 60 and over are still working for employers who enforce the default retirement age of 65, and 250,000 aged 60 to 64 say it is likely or certain that they will be forced to retire.
The default retirement age allows employers to force workers to finish work at 65, although they are obliged to consider reqests from individuals for their retirement to be postponed.
Charities have warned in the past that when companies are trying to save money they may use the rules to get rid of older staff, rather than making younger staff redundant. However, employers do have to give six months’ notice that they plan to enforce the rules.
The default retirement age prevents employers from forcing workers to retire earlier unless an earlier retirement age can be justified: many companies had a compulsory retirement age of 60 previously. Last month the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHEC) called for the government to scrap the default retirement age and to extend the right to request flexible working to all employees and consider introducing incentives for flexible employers, with a particular emphasis on the over-50s.
A survey of 1,500 workers by the commission suggested a rule change would be welcomed by many workers. It found that 64% of women and 24% of men wanted to remain economically active after the state pension age (currently 65 for men and rising to 65 for women by 2020).
Margaret Davison-Scott was forced to retire from two part-time jobs she had with the East Riding of Yorkshire Council when she reached her 65th birthday.
“The council had mandatory retirement at 65 – unless you were in a key position, you had to leave. One person said they had to free jobs up for younger people, but the kind of jobs I was doing – part-time as a librarian and in the housing department – weren’t the kind of things you would sign off benefits for,” she said.
Davison-Scott is now living on the basic state pension and a small occupational pension, producing a combined total of less that £1,000 a month. She said: “I wasn’t ready to give up the ghost: I miss the people I worked with and it’s been a struggle financially.”
A spokesman for East Riding of Yorkshire Council said: “All individuals are afforded their full statutory rights to request retention beyond the age of 65 and it is up to the employing department to determine if individuals meet the criteria for retention.
“Individuals who are not successful in securing retention have the right of appeal against that decision. Where successful in their request to be retained, employees have been retained beyond the age of 65 across all directorates of the council in a wide range of occupations.”
Although the government has said that its long-term aim is to scrap fixed retirement ages, and that will review the default retirement age this year, Age Concern and Help the Aged has called on all political parties to adopt the policy in their manifestos.
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UK debt will push retirement age to 70
Feb 25th
PWC report on state pensions warns that dire public finances means plans to raise retirement age to 68 do not go far enough
An ageing population and the poor condition of the public finances will require the state pension age to be raised to 70 by the middle of this century, one of Britain’s leading consultancies warned today.
PricewaterhouseCoopers said government plans to raise the pension age in three stages from 65 now to 68 by 2046 did not go far enough, given the sharp increase in national debt caused by the recession of the past two and a half years.
John Hawksworth, PWC’s chief economist, said that the public should be offered a deal by the state: work longer in return for an assurance that pensions would rise in line with average earnings.
He added that future governments would need to raise the pension age to 70 in order to guarantee that the earnings link would remain in place.
“The sweet spot enjoyed by the economy during the past 30 years as the post-war baby boomers moved through the workforce has the potential to turn sour as longer periods of retirement leave a lasting and expensive burden on future generations of workers,” Hawksworth said.
“Either taxes will have to rise or other policies need to adjust to deal with the higher costs of state pensions, health and long-term care, as well as the large debt hangover from the global financial crisis,” he said.
Hawksworth added that plans to raise the pension age to 66 by 2020, to 67 by 2036 and to 68 by 2046 provided part of the solution to the rising cost of retirement but did not go far enough.
The savings from raising the state pension age to 70 would be £9bn a year at today’s prices, enough to cover the majority of the costs of an earnings-indexed basic pension.
“This would restrict greatly the spread of means-testing for future pensioners and avoid adding to the already large burdens of public debt and taxation on the children and grandchildren of the baby boomers,” he said.
PWC estimates that pushing the state pension age up to 70 would avoid the need for higher taxes, which would amount to 2p on the basic rate of income tax or a two-point increase in VAT.
The consultancy’s report – Working Longer, Living Better – said the changes to the state pension age should be accompanied by the scrapping of the “increasingly anachronistic” default retirement age for employees.
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Tory ‘death tax’ poster condemned
Feb 13th
Advocate for elderly Joan Bakewell say party wrangling over social care funding is insult to public
Tory posters claiming Labour is planning a £20,000 “death tax” to fund a national carers service have been condemned as “grotesque” and a lie by Dame Joan Bakewell, the former BBC presenter and the government’s “voice of older people”.
She accused the Conservatives of “an insult to older people”, and said the collapse of talks designed to reach a cross-party consensus on funding future social care will increase despair about politics.
The Guardian revealed this week that Andy Burnham, the health secretary, has been looking at introducing a compulsory inheritance tax, set at a maximum of £20,000, as the preferred option in a white paper due next month.
Burnham believes that after years of delay the government might win public respect for being brave on the issue.
Bakewell was one of a number of advocates of a better-funded social care system in Britain who expressed exasperation at the inability of the parties to put the tricky issue beyond party politics. She has also criticised Labour’s handling of the issue. She said: “What the country needs is solutions, and not wars between parties. We have had a lot of pious talk recently about how we must salvage the reputation of parliament because of the expenses scandal, but scandal is still going on because people are telling lies.
“That poster ‘Gordon Brown wants £20,000 when you die’ is merely one of a series of options being put forward as a way of stopping people having to sell their houses. This option of paying £20,000 out of your estate when you die is one proposal put forward in good faith. To turn it into this grotesque poster is an insult to everybody and it damages the case for older people and their care.”
Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, defended the posters and his decision to pull out of the talks last month. He said he had not consulted David Cameron about the talks.
The poster has led to a furious private row between Burnham and Lansley.
Cameron’s staff ordered the posters to go up after the Guardian reported that Burnham was pressing for the levy to be included in Labour’s manifesto. “It was necessary to criticise him and right to criticise him, because frankly it is an extremely bad policy,” Lansley said.
Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, accused Cameron of “driving a wrecking ball” through attempts to reach cross-party consensus. “It is cynical, short-sighted and contemptible behaviour.”
Lansley said a compulsory levy would penalise families who look after their elderly relatives at home; they would have to pay the money even though their relatives did not go into residential care.
Lansley also revealed that he initiated the private talks with Burnham last year, which also included the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, Norman Lamb. But he strongly denied that Cameron had ordered him to pull out, on learning of the discussions. He said that the discussions ended in January because the sides could not agree on the principles of reform.
He said: “No agreement had been reached, and, in particular, no agreement about any further process was undertaken, nor any agreement that political parties shouldn’t be able to continue to campaign on our policies and to criticise each others’ policies.”
Burnham has been pressing him to drop claims that Labour would fund residential care by cutting invalidity benefit.
Lamb said the parties in the talks had agreed key principles on the importance of preventative healthcare, on being able to move the care package around the country, on involving and recognising the role of carers, and on efforts to give individuals as much freedom as possible to decide how money devoted to their care should be spent.
Labour was looking last night to see if it could win Liberal Democratic agreement to propose to Lansley that the all-party talks resume on the basis that a flat rate levy was not on the table.
Cabinet ministers privately admit the levy, set out in a green paper in the summer, is high risk but need to find the extra £6bn or so required annually to look after an ageing population’s care needs. Last October Lansley proposed a social insurance system costing £8,000 per person that would cover residential care costs for life.
At present many older people sell their homes to fund residential care. The average cost of residential care for a 65-year-old over the rest of their life is £30,000.
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Can Saga take care of you?
Feb 13th
The company is to roll-out the first national network of private at-home care assistants. Patrick Collinson examines the deal and what state help you can get
Funding for home care for the elderly is under intense pressure from town hall cutbacks, according to a report this week – with pensioners suffering a massive postcode lottery on home help and meals on wheels.
As publicly funded care is axed, will the likes of Saga fill some of the gap? The company has, until now, been known for its over-50s cruises, magazine and insurance products. But after a successful trial in Kent, it is preparing a nationwide service offering “domicillary care” priced from £14 an hour to the growing number of elderly people who need help around the house but don’t want to go into a care home.
Saga has quietly piloted its Independent Living service across Kent, and although no formal launch date has been set, it is now preparing to roll out the concept across the UK, making it the first big brand name to offer a nationally available care service.
The launch comes amid a crisis in local authority care funding. This week, the annual report of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said seven out of 10 councils demand that a person be assessed as in “substantial” need before he or she can access any publicly funded home care. An elderly person has to be unable to carry out a range of normal activities before the council steps in. Even then, the council will means-test the individual – and if he or she has assets above £23,000 they will have to pay for it themselves.
If your needs are “low” or “moderate”, which can mean that perhaps you live alone, have problems getting up in the morning, difficulty preparing food and carrying out normal domestic routines, it is virtually impossible to get home care funded by the council.
Coverage varies enormously across the UK. The CQC report found that three councils in its survey had only enough cash to offer home care assistance to people rated “critical”. It also found a few councils that had enough cash to provide home care to individuals assessed as low or moderate needs.
Saga reckons it can fill at least some of the gaps. Chief executive Roger Ramsden says: “It is a service that needs to be delivered properly, with all the care and attention that might be received from a family carer looking after a loved one. There is a lack of a trusted brand in this market, so the opportunity is huge if you get the service right.”
Private home care services such as Saga’s are not new – agencies abound in retirement areas such as Bexhill and Eastbourne – but until now there has been no national brand name in the market. Bupa trialled a service but pulled out, unable to make it work commercially. But will Saga be any better than services offered by other local private agencies, and how do you ensure you’ve exhausted all chances of finding local authority-funded care before paying privately?
Prices
Saga talks of providing care at £14-£15 an hour, but says that it will vary. “That’s the sort of price we might charge in say, Folkestone, but if you were in, say, Tunbridge Wells, then the local cost of labour might be higher and we would have to charge more,” a spokesman says. Inevitably, home care in London will cost more than in other parts of the UK.
How does it compare? Guardian Money rang round a number of home care agencies in Kent, where Saga carried out its pilot scheme. D&J Home Support Agency in Folkestone said it offers full domicillary care services starting at £12.36 an hour between 8am and 6pm, or £14.85 at other times. It offers half-hour care slots, priced between £7.37 and £8.90
KeyCare, based in Dover, said it charges £8.50 for 30 minutes, £9.85 for 45 minutes and £13 for an hour. Prices go up for “unsocial hours”, anything outside 7am-7pm Monday to Friday, taking the rate to between £10.90 and £15.40 an hour.
Shaun Farkhondeh of KeyCare says the typical client wants a care assistant for three half-hour slots a day, to help get up in the morning, prepare lunch and then help them to bed. That suggests a daily fee of around £28.
The providers
To find an at-home carer, start with the Care Quality Commission. Under “Find care services” you can access an online directory of all the home care agencies it has inspected, searchable by postcode. These are ranked from zero stars (poor) to three stars (excellent). You can try the UK Homecare Association or call 020 8288 5291. It also has an online search facility which locates members closest to your postcode. Members have to comply with a code of practice in which, it says, the rights and welfare of clients are paramount.
The service
Home care takes many different forms. Some people may just be seeking light domestic duties, help with shopping and preparing meals or taking medication. At the other end are “high dependency” clients who need help with things such as going to the toilet, incontinence and catheter care, or may be suffering dementia. Some home care agencies specialise in high dependency, and charge more. Others, such as KeyCare, charge a flat rate whether the client is low or high dependency. The company will negotiate a lower fee if the requirement is more about companionship or help with shopping and housework.
Some customers will wonder if they will get the time they pay for. Local authorities have been criticised for failing to account for travel time between clients, with the result that carers who are supposed to help out for, say, 30 minutes, stay only 10 minutes or so. All the agencies contacted by Money, including Saga, insisted the client receives the full amount of time.
At the top end, you can buy full-time, live-in care, where the carer follows a tailor-made plan. KeyCare says a basic live-in care and support package would cost from £700 per week, for example. If that sounds prohibitively expensive, Farkhondeh says it’s comparable to the alternative of going into a residential care home.
Quality
Is the care worker who comes to your parent’s home going to be reliable, honest and, well, caring? The CQC inspections are thorough, according to agencies, which fear them as much as schools fear a poor Ofsted report. “They speak to the clients, the clients’ families and to the care workers. It’s a really good, thorough inspection,” says Farkhondeh, whose agency received a two-star (“good”) report.
A new CQC registration system will ensure common standards across adult social care. Overall, one in six home care agencies were, according to this week’s CQC report, only awarded one star (“adequate”) and one in 50 were rated as “poor”. It said: “We found that 58% of older people using home care services were extremely or very satisfied with the service that they received. However, 30% said that their home care service provider hardly ever or never told them in advance about changes in the care they received.”
Local authority provision
Your first step is to contact your local authority social services department or your GP. Ask them to carry out a care (or needs) assessment. You will be assessed in one of four bands from low to critical. If you fall into the two lowest bands, your chances of obtaining assistance are remote, but it’s worth trying.
If your needs are assessed as “substantial” or “critical” then you’re in with a much better chance. But what does “substantial” mean? The Department of Health’s Fair Access to Care Services says it means “an inability to carry out the majority of personal care or domestic routines”, but, inevitably, any assessment will be to a degree subjective.
Then comes the financial assessment. If you have capital (income and savings, but not the value of your home) of more than £23,000, you will be asked to pay the full cost of home care services provided. If your capital is between £14,000 and £23,000, there is a sliding scale of payments. Note that local authorities are supposed to assess you as an individual, not on your partner’s income. In Scotland, the majority of care is provided free of charge.
The Personal Care at Home Bill, currently going through parliament, will give 270,000 people assessed as “critical” completely free care in the home, irrespective of their financial means. But council leaders have fiercely criticised the government for failing to allocate sufficient money to provide for free care, and warn that council tax may have to rise as a result.
One pot of cash that’s relatively easy to access is Attendance Allowance (AA), worth between £47.10 and £70.35 a week. You’ll get it if you need help with your personal care, such as washing, dressing, eating or going to the toilet. It’s not means-tested, you don’t need to have paid national insurance, and you can spend it on whatever you want. Call the government’s Benefits Enquiry Line on 0800 88 22 00 to get the forms sent to you.
AA can be the passport to other benefits, so it’s worth applying. Your local Age Concern/Help the Aged will give you a free benefits check-up to ensure you are getting what you are entitled to. Age Concern’s website also has a fantastic array of in-depth factsheets on finding and funding care at home.
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The elderly pay the price of the excess years
Feb 13th
Posted by Patrick Collinson in Finance
As the axe falls on publicly funded care, Patrick Collinson asks why the poor and infirm should pay for the greed of bankers
Janet lives in a privately rented flat in London. She’s 72, never married, and has no children. Unfortunately, she smoked most of her life. Today she suffers terribly from emphysema. She’s short of breath just from walking up a couple of stairs. And that’s rather a serious problem when you’re in a flat and there’s no lift. So Janet is effectively locked in her home.
Her body may be enfeebled, but her mind is not. The internet has been a lifeline – she uses it to arrange deliveries of everything from food to clothes and books. She rather likes Skype, too.
Fortunately for her, the part of London in which she lives still provides a decent level of care at home. The council provides twice-a-day home help, for half an hour at a time.
It doesn’t always work out like that, though. Often that half hour is just 15 minutes, with the carer dashing off to her next appointment. And Janet never knows who is going to arrive – almost every day there seems to be someone different. But she doesn’t moan. She’s got a small private pension on top of her state pension and she gets the full attendance allowance as well, worth another £71 a week.
In many ways we can take pride in this. As a society we’re helping look after the likes of Janet; after all, she’s getting a state pension, free healthcare and free medicine, plus help at home from qualified carers.
But how much longer is this going to last? She’s already a beneficiary of the postcode lottery, receiving help that, if she lived in another local authority, would almost certainly be denied her.
As Age Concern and Help the Aged points out, the budgets for care at home are not ringfenced. How long will it be before home help is swept away in the orgy of public spending cuts that will come after the election, no matter which political party wins?
I’ve written this week about Saga, and the potential roll-out of its care service across the country. It’s difficult to see how it can fail, given the axe falling on publicly funded care precisely at the time when the 70-plus population is rapidly expanding. But it would be cruel to suggest private operators, such as Saga, can fill the gaps left by the state. A “typical” client of home care needs to spend £28-£30 a day, or more than £200 a week. In London it will be much more. Only people with a decent-sized private pension and savings on top of their state pension will be able to afford a private at-home carer.
What of the people who are judged in “moderate” or even “substantial” need, but don’t have savings? When the axe falls, they will lose free care at home – and with residential homes closing faster than pubs, they’ll have nowhere else to go. We’ll be closing the door on them and effectively throwing away the keys.
I bumped into a former acquaintance on Savile Row the other day, a derivatives dealer, moaning about the 50% bonus tax – but he didn’t seem to be reining in his spending. Let’s be clear – when the likes of George Osborne talk about fiscal discipline and bankers moan about taxes, it will be the Janets of this world who will be paying for the years of excess.
p.collinson@guardian.co.uk