The following details have been supplied by the TUC:
The Chancellor’s December 2013 budget delivered a crumb of safety comfort but accompanied it with some devastating news for your prospects of ever living to see your pension.
George Osborne announced the government will extend the exemption from taxation on medical treatments recommended by employer-arranged occupational health services, with an anticipated £500 limit on the costs. This will be in addition to treatments recommended by the new Health and Work Service, which starts later this year.
This means that those workers who are lucky enough to have an employer who is willing to refer them to a physio or other type of therapist is no longer going to find themselves issued with a big tax bill. But a big budget cut to the Health and Safety Executive’s parent ministry, DWP, may well mean even further cuts in the HSE budget on top of a 35 per cent cut over the last four years.
But it is the government’s plans for a staged increase in the state pension age to 70 that will be guaranteed bad news for many.
Life expectancy at birth for males in Kensington and Chelsea (one of the richest boroughs in the country) is 85.1, and 89.8 for females. In Glasgow, men’s expectancy is 71.6 and women’s is 78. That means that Glasgow men die 14 years earlier than their well-heeled Kensington and Chelsea counterparts.
Average pay for men in the London borough in 2011 was over three and a half times that of a man in Glasgow (£87,516 compared to £23,356). So if the pension age is raised to 70 the average Glaswegian man might expect to be able to claim it for just over a year.
According to TUC head of safety Hugh Robertson: “It is not just a geographical split. It is also a work one. How many construction workers are going to be able to continue until they are 70? Those that have not succumbed to the much higher rates of cancer that plague construction workers will almost certainly have had to stop working long before then because of musculoskeletal disorders like back, hip or knee problems.”
