THE National Pensioners Convention together with Trade Union Congress are to make representations to the government concerning the way it has misled pensioners.

Our older people were sold the idea that the so-called minimum income guarantee, due to come into effect as from next April, of £75 for single pensioners and £116 for couples (if you are over 75), represents an improvement in their basic state pension when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

This proposed increment represents an above-inflation in income support benefit which, undoubtedly, will be welcome by some 1.5 million pensioners who are currently in receipt of income support or entitled by means-testing to it. But it does nothing for the 8.5 million pensioners who only qualify for the standard rate inflation/prices uprating.

Therefore the majority of pensioners will receive no benefit whatsoever from this latest 'twist-in-tail' proposal. This imposition is simply a ploy by the government to make better off pensioners pay for the income support rises scheduled for next April.

This government, like the previous one, has made great play of their concern for pensioners, the chronically sick and genuinely disabled getting their just benefits. But the fact is that millions of pensioners and the more vulnerable in our society, according to the London School of Economics, are considerably worse off financially since the Labour government took office. These are the issues the NPC, TUC and the European Trades Union Confederation will be addressing during the September Conference of the TUC and Labour Party in Blackpool where massive demonstrations are being organised.

As I have forecast repeatedly in these columns the government are to introduce the most radical means-testing ever in the United Kingdom by the year 2003/4 which will eliminate millions from basic state pension entitlements.

Richard Grave

Pensioners European Confederation

TUC Resources Centre

178a Lancaster Road

Morecambe

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