How UK has worst elderly poverty in western Europe: Study
The proportion of elderly people who are living in severe poverty in the UK is five times what it was in 1986, the Pension Reforms and Old Age Inequalities in Europe report found.
The rate has shot up from 0.9 percent to around 5 percent. Professor Bernhard Ebbinghaus of the University of Oxford blamed state pensions for the rise in poverty among people aged 65 and over.
He told The Observer: “The UK is a good example of the Beveridge-lite systems that have historically failed to combat old-age poverty.
“These have rather ungenerous basic pensions with means-tested supplements, and this reproduces relatively high severe poverty rates among the elderly.
“Income-tested or means-tested targeted benefits are needed to supplement basic pensions and to lift them out of severe poverty – every sixth British pensioner receives such additional benefits.” The study found that in the mid-1980s Britain had the equal-lowest severe poverty rates among older people of 16 western European countries, at about 1 percent. But by 2008 it had reached 6 percent and only Switzerland, Ireland and Spain were higher. Over the next eight years the proportion remained at just under 5 percent.
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