Women's Views on News |
| Time to re-think the pension policy Posted: 03 Nov 2015 01:30 AM PST
At present the age at which you become entitled to the state pension is 65 for men and 62 years and 8 months for women. Women's state pension age is rising in stages, a month at a time, and will reach 65 by 2018. But the postponement of retirement will not stop then, and state pension age for men and women will rise to 66 by 2026 and 67 by 2028. It is not supposed to rise to 68 till 2044, but the government plans to review this decision in 2017 and many commentators expect them to speed up this process. The government argues that this is a fair decision. The Chancellor, George Osborne, announced the principle behind it in his 2013 Autumn Statement: "We think a fair principle is that, as now, people should expect to spend up to a third of their adult life in retirement. "Based on latest life expectancy figures, applying that principle would mean an increase in the state pension age to 68 in the mid 2030s and to 69 in the late 2040s." The Chancellor relied on people failing to think through what is fair and what isn't in retirement policy. Most of us hope to have a few years of "active retirement" after we finish employment – time to spend doing things with friends and family, crossing off some of the items on our lifetime lists. One of the requirements for this is that we should be healthy enough to live an active life. This is not the same as not being disabled, disabled people can be as healthy or unhealthy as non-disabled people. Unfortunately, life expectancy figures are substantially higher than healthy life expectancy. In England, a boy born between 2011 and 2013 could expect to live, on average for 79.4 years, and a girl for 83. A man who did not retire till he was 69 could expect, on average, ten years of retirement and a woman 14 years. This is a long way from a third, but it does not sound unreasonable. But, if we looked at retired people, we would find that very many of them were not healthy, not healthy enough for an active retirement. Of these English boys and girls born in 2011-13, the men could expect to live 63.3 years of their 79.4 years of life in "good" health and the women could expect 63.9 years of "good" health. Most of us know that women can expect to live three or four years longer than men, but the fact that the gap in healthy life expectancy is much smaller is less well-known. According to official figures, life expectancy and healthy life expectancy the Midlands is a little lower than for England as a whole. In both East and West Midlands, Healthy Life Expectancy is already lower than the current state pension age for men and it will be lower for women by 2018. Figures like these, however, drastically misrepresent the unequal impact of raising the state pension age. There are certainly inequalities between regions, but the most shocking inequalities are between poorer and richer areas. We can see this using a second set of official figures, in which England is divided into more than 32,000 areas. These are ranked from poorest to richest – using the English Indices of Deprivation – and then divided into ten deciles. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) then calculates the life expectancy and the healthy life expectancy for the men and women in each decile (life expectancies are so different for men and women that it is not useful to report them together). There is a clear "social gradient" in life expectancy. These tables illustrate the unfairness of the arrangements for raising the state pension age. In the cities, both men and women already face a state pension age higher than healthy life expectancy in their area. By 2018, for example, when women's state pension age will be 2.3 years higher than it is now, men and women in most Midlands local authorities will face a retirement with a comparatively short period of health and activity. Time to think through what is fair and what isn't – and what we want to see in a retirement policy.  |
| Women’s Aid helps with safer futures Posted: 03 Nov 2015 01:00 AM PST
Women's Aid, a national charity for women and children working to end domestic abuse, has just held its first Safer Futures conference in central London. Local specialist services, teachers, other school professionals and commissioners shared knowledge, creative ideas, evidence and experience on delivering preventive programmes on healthy relationships to children and young people using Women's Aid’s Expect Respect toolkit. Safer Futures is a national project that aims to build networks between local schools, specialist domestic violence services and local authorities to ensure that healthy relationships education is delivered responsibly and effectively. The project aims to create a consistent and regulated approach to supporting schools addressng domestic violence by drawing on the expertise of specialist practitioners who are trained in this area. The project consists of a national team of Women's Aid Schools Advocates (WASAs) who provide in-school support for teachers presenting lessons using the Expect Respect Education Toolkit. This Toolkit consists of one easy to use 'Core' lesson for each year group from reception to year 13 and is based on themes that have been found to be effective in tackling domestic abuse. And although the Expect Respect Education Toolkit is targeted for use by teachers in schools, it can just as easily be used by a range of other professionals working with children and young people in a variety of settings such as youth clubs or play schemes. To download this toolkit, click here. You do not need to use the whole toolkit; you could just download the introductory section and the year that is appropriate to the age group you are working with. Women’s Aid have also worked with the Home Office to produce Expect Respect: A Toolkit for addressing Teenage Relationship Abuse. This adapted version of the Toolkit is one strand of a campaign launched by the Home Office in February 2010 to challenge the attitudes of teenagers to violence and abuse in relationships. For more information, visit the This Is Abuse campaign website. Safer Futures ensures that, nationally, every child and young person can be given a healthy relationships education, rather than receiving such an education being a postcode lottery. In addition, the aims of the Safer Futures project are to: Provide professionals working in local domestic violence services with the tools and training to better support their local schools; Help teachers to feel confident in delivering lessons about domestic violence using the Expect Respect Educational Toolkit; Encourage young people to build healthy, respectful relationships, and identify abusive behaviours in themselves and others; and Enable local domestic violence services to raise awareness and become further embedded in local communities. If you are a school and you would like to know who your local Women’s Aid School Advocate is, please email the National Schools Engagement Officer, Amna Abdullatif. Women's Aid is also working with the PHSE Association and campaigning to get sex and relationships education made compulsory in all schools – something which is currently being considered at ministerial level. You can support that campaign too: click here to join in. Thanks.  |
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