Private pensions disappointing
Pensioners have incomes from private pensions four times bigger than Government statisticians claimed three months ago. It is not often the Office for National Statistics (ONS) gets anything quite so wrong. In April ONS claimed "the average annual private pension income in 2005/06 was £2,115 for pensioner couples while for single men it was £1,553 and for single women £1,238." But a month later it withdrew the estimates and this week it released corrected figures which had been "quality assured."
The ONS now says the correct figures are more than four times as big – £9,607 a year for pensioner couples and £6,272 and £5,137 for single men and women. ONS has not said what went wrong but it seems likely that one quarter’s figures were used instead of the whole year’s.
At the same time ONS released figures for 2006/07. They showed that "average [annual] private pension income was £11,059 for pensioner couples, while for single men pensioners it was £6,812 and for single women pensioners it was £5,519."
Although these incomes are higher than those for the previous year they are still pretty low. More than six out of ten single pensioners have total income from private and state pensions of less than £10,000 and nearly half of pensioner couples managed on less than £15,000.
And the detailed figures show that the average income figures are misleading. They are distorted by a few people who have very big pensions. A significant number – especially among the couples – has more than £30,000 a year coming in from private pensions. In fact the detailed figures show that half of single men have private pensions of less than £4,093 a year and a quarter have less than £1,646. Many of the bigger private pensions are in fact public sector salary-related superannuation. Leaving the dregs for people who have struggled to put money into a pension fund themselves and find they get only £20 or £30 week for all that saving.
Small incomes like that will leave them little better off that the one in three pensioner households who has no private pension at all. They have to rely on the state pension or pension credit which averaged £10,191 a year for couples and about £6,800 for singles.
With the cost of heating, food, and travel all rising – as this week’s latest inflation figures show – no wonder people over 65 feel hard done by.
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