I was far from surprised to read yesterday of evidence that an increasing number of retired people are failing to claim the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/feb/21/pensioners-state-benefits-failing-to-claim
If true - and the survey is relatively small - this is sad news. Benefit underpayment is the unsung scandal of these tough times, while apparently endless column inches can be found for overpayment and fraud tales; more disturbingly, this suggests the current generation of pensioners are at least as conscious of a stigma attached to Social Security Benefits as the previous one.
Almost twenty years ago I started work for a Home Improvement Agency, a project assisting older and disabled people to arrange repairs and adaptations to their homes. Part of my role was to check benefit entitlement, and then to advise and assist with claims where appropriate. A successful claim for a qualifying benefit might lead to entitlement to free energy efficiency work, grants for minor repairs and reduced contributions to the costs of larger projects, so much more than extra weekly income was at stake. Despite this, I would often struggle to persuade clients that making a claim was the right thing to do. Even the elderly woman who couldn't afford to switch the heating elements of her electric fire on, but had the light on for the illusion of a warming glow, needed patiently reassuring that there was nothing shameful in claiming Council Tax Benefit and Attendance Allowance.
'Means-tested' was a phrase to be avoided at all costs, even if what you were advising them to claim was a means-tested benefit. But these were the children of people who, if they fell on hard times, might have had their homes inspected to ensure they hadn't frittered funds away on luxuries and trivialities, before some well-meaning but judgmental middle-class inspector awarded them emergency relief. Their own children, raised with the Welfare State and the promise of support from the cradle to the grave are now pensioners and should be able to stand clear of the shadow of the workhouse, but for some reason the reticence to claim lives on.
There appear to be several barriers. The complexity of the benefits system hinders many people identifying their entitlement, regardless of age, but I believe there's more to it with older people. It probably doesn't help that, according to the papers' own figures, 74% of Daily Mail and 76% of Daily Express readers are aged over 45, with the Express giving it's over 65s readership as 40% and the average age of its readers as 59. So in the run-up to and years of retirement, these poor misguided souls exist on a diet of shirkers and scroungers stories, often contrasting these 'undeserving' characters with 'our pensioners' stoically coping with hardship. Today, for example, the DM has a suitably shocking tale combining those twin evils of benefit claiming and animal cruelty while the DE continues to focus its self-righteous malice on a woman 'on benefits' with eleven children.
And day after day, you'll find the same. Our 'local rag' from the Mail's stable, has already run three stories about an alleged benefit fraudster before her case has even concluded, though doubtless it's pure coincidence that the woman in question is black, of non-UK nationality and has a potentially amusing surname for trolls to mock. Another story concerning a pensioner still delivering the aforementioned 'local rag' well into her eighties predictably attracts comments contrasting her to 'lazy workshy youngsters' - exactly what it was intended to do, I suggest.
For all their best efforts to combat these attitudes, organisations like Citizens Advice, Age UK, Disability Alliance and the Pensioners Convention are fighting an unequal battle against such a hostile press. Their reasoned voices will always be drowned out by tabloid hysteria from those same papers who will point the finger of blame at Social Workers, Civil Servants and Modern Society in general every time a 'poor but proud' older person dies from hypothermia, without asking if perhaps their 'independence good: benefits bad' message wasn't at least equally to blame.
