Читать книгу The Moral State We’re In - Julia Neuberger - Страница 6

As well as the difficulty of coping with personal administration, nightmarish though that may be, many old and frail people also have to cope with extreme poverty. Whilst the focus of much public policy in recent years has been on child poverty, poverty is still a major issue for many older people. This is especially true of what is described by the Faculty of Public Health as ‘fuel poverty’, which is where any household has to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on keeping warm. For older people, this is not uncommon: they need their houses to be warmer than younger people do, and often live in poorer quality housing than younger people. Though there are government programmes to address this, the ‘warm front’ programme, aimed at preventing some of the worst excesses of winter deaths by providing better insulation and heating, is only worth £400 million. But the £1.9 billion spent on winter fuel allowances may be a less than efficient way of tackling the problem. For many older people are still seriously poor. Inequality amongst retired people is even greater than amongst the working population. The top 20 per cent of pensioner couples have a retirement income averaging around £45,000 per annum, whilst a quarter of all pensioners–over two million people–live below the poverty line (£5,800 for a single person.) The Guardian, on the day of the particular story cited above, called for the Government to add to its target for the abolition of child poverty by 2020 a similar target for the abolition of older people’s poverty as well.