Income and Poverty in Later Life

I attended the launch of a new report today at the Pensions Policy Institute. The report is 'Retirement Income and Assets: Do Pensioners have sufficient income to meet their needs'. In keeping with the PPIs excellent reputation, it is a thorough and thought-provoking piece of research, and the launch event was too. The report covers many areas relating to income and poverty of older people but highlights what I think is one of the most problematic areas in the way that we think about income, poverty and older people. This is, what does it mean for your income, your quality of life, and your experience of hardship, if you or your partner, or both of you, develop ill health or become frail or unwell in later life? In official low income statistics, we have no way of accounting for the increased costs associated with disability, frailty and ill health. Some increased costs are pretty obvious - like if you have to heat your house all day to keep warm, or if you have increased washing to do and so on. But to really keep the quality of life that you had before, or as close to it as you can get, requires paying for things that are not so obvious - so for example, if you took great pleasure from your garden, but can no longer do the gardening, then to maintain that quality of life you would now have to pay a gardener. If you can no longer walk to the bus, then to get out as much as you used to, you may need taxis, or even to hire a car and a driver for example if you live in a rural area where there are no taxis. If you can no longer take routine exercise, then you may benefit strongly from having regular physiotherapy which you would have to pay for. I don't think governments really recognise that when older people adjust to a much reduced lifestyle, this may in fact only be the result of not having suffucient money to maintain their earlier lifestyle - it's not a preference. Their health problems have made them poorer. We have no poverty measures that take account of this. This is compounded in official statistics because in the UK, any disability benefits, which are meant to help towards these additional costs of disability, are counted as income BUT no account is taken of the additional costs that those benefits are meant to help with. The PPI report concludes that many pensioners will struggle to cope with health-related costs as they age. I think this is a topic that deserves much more research attention than it currently gets.