Work and Pensions

PENSIONS

• Pension funds have been raided by £5 billion a year because of Labour’s pension tax.

• 65,000 people have lost retirement savings because their company pension schemes have been closed.

• There are now over 5 million pensioners subjected to means testing, nearly half of all pensioners.

• The Pension Credit is so complicated and unpopular that 1.6 million eligible pensioners fail to receive the money to which they are entitled.

• Typical pensioners have seen more than a third of the increase in the basic state pension snatched back in higher council tax.

WELFARE

• There are two million people defined as ‘economically inactive’ but who want to work – they do not appear in the official unemployment figures.

• There are over a million people parked on incapacity benefits who want to work – they do not appear in the official unemployment figures.

• There are over a million young people not in work or full-time education.

• The New Deal has cost £6 billion but less than a third of the people put through it move into sustained employment – the rest just go back onto benefits.

• At least £3 billion of taxpayers’ money disappears each year in benefit fraud.

• Over two million pensioners still live in poverty.

• Labour have fiddled the child poverty figures to remove 900,000 children from their lists.

CONSERVATIVE ACTION

• Conservatives will raise the basic state pension in line with earnings, not prices. This will give pensioners a bigger state pension and set many people free from the need to claim means tested benefits.

• Conservatives will cut council tax bills for households where the occupants are over 65 by half, giving pensioners up to £500 every year.

• Conservatives will help people with broken career records, due to caring for children or sick relatives, by giving them credits to build up a contributory state pension.

• Conservatives will help people who have lost their company pension savings due to their firm going bust by using the unclaimed assets of dormant bank accounts to replenish their pension funds.

• Conservatives will create new incentives to save with a Lifetime Savings Account. On the principle of ‘buy one get one free’, we will reward people’s savings with government contributions.

• Conservatives will scrap the failing new deal and allow specialist welfare-to-work contractors from the voluntary and commercial sectors to help people into jobs that last.

Promoted by G A Nichols on behalf of Andrew Turner, both of 58 The Mall, Carisbrooke Road, Newport, Isle of Wight, PO30 1BW and by
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