Money
Pensions
Calls for a fairer pension in 100th year
The National Pensioners Convention wants the state pension to be raised to £134 a week to celebrate its centenary. And quite right too, writes Paul Lewis
It is a modest demand for such a momentous birthday. The plans for an old-age pension were first announced in the King's speech on January 29, 1908. It was four months before the details were presented to Parliament but just nine weeks later, on April 1, the Old-Age Pensions Act 1908 became law.
It took the rest of the year to put in the administration to receive and decide hundreds of thousands of applications. The first pensions of five shillings a week (worth £21.45 today) were paid on January 1 1909.
On that historic Friday more than half a million people called at their local post office to draw the UK's first state pension. One post office in Battersea, London, reported 40 people queuing outside by eight in the morning. Crimean war veteran George Hibbard, 77, was one of the first to collect his pension and, The Times reported, "received his two half crowns smilingly."
To qualify for the pension four tests had to be passed. First, people had to be 70 years old. Documentary evidence of age was often scant. Compulsory registration of births began barely 70 years earlier in England and Wales in 1837 and even later in Scotland (1855) and Ireland (1864). Before fines were introduced in 1875, many births remained unregistered.
Second, the pension was means-tested. The full five shillings was paid to those with an income up to £21 a year (£1800 at today's prices). A reduced pension on a sliding scale down to one shilling was paid on an annual income up to £31-10s (£2700 at present prices). Those on higher incomes got nothing. John Pleass of Devon was the first to be prosecuted for lying about his income. On February 6 1909 he was convicted and fined £1. He was lucky; the maximum penalty was six months hard labour.
Third, you had to be resident in the UK for 20 years and a British subject. That excluded British women who had married foreign men but included foreign wives of British citizens. In the first year, 424 appeals were lodged against nationality exclusions.
Fourth, you could not claim the pension for 10 years after the end of a prison sentence. On April 10 1909 Catherine Tivnan was convicted at Boyle petty sessions of claiming a pension when she was only 64, using her deceased sister’s baptism certificate. She was jailed for a few hours but that was enough to disqualify her until she was 74.
Far more people successfully claimed the old-age pension than the Government expected. In the first three months, more than 600,000 people had received it, almost all at the maximum rate of five shillings. Chancellor David Lloyd George had to ask Parliament for an extra £901,000, as the cost for the first three months shot up from £1.2million to more than £2m. In the first year the Government spent £9.5m paying the 734,000 successful claimants – £3.5m more than the original estimate.
So come on Labour Government. Let’s see a decent pension and an end to means-testing to celebrate this unique centenary.
* Visit www.npcuk.org/pension100/ and add your voice to the campaign.
