Introduction

In Chapter One we noted that the UK experienced considerable income growth from the 1960s onwards despite prolonged periods of economic crisis and high unemployment (Atkinson, 2000). Many older people benefited from these increases in income so that the economic position of older people has improved markedly over the past few decades in Britain as it has in most of the advanced industrialised world (Disney and Whitehouse, 2001; Casey and Yamada, 2002). This improvement creates winners and losers, with retirement age couples doing considerably better than single pensioners and women, particularly women who become widows, benefiting less (DWP, 2007). The overall rise in living standards was accompanied by growing inequalities in income from the 1960s onwards, particularly during the period between 1979 and 1997. The growth in income inequality among the working age population in Britain during the 1980s was exceptionally high (Atkinson, 1999) and rising income inequality continued through to the end of the century, but changes since 2000 are less clear (Dorling et al, 2007). Income mobility among the retired population increased with marked reductions in poverty rates, and the overall variability in pensioner incomes increased rather less than within the working age population during these last two decades (Forster, 2000; Brown and Prus, 2006). Zaidi and colleagues (2005) account for the decline in the incidence of poverty among the elderly by referring to the fact that later (younger) cohorts were more likely to have had occupational pensions. Furthermore, their findings show that ‘as measured by the Gini coefficient, income inequality has increased amongst older people in Great Britain’ (Zaidi et al, 2005, p 551). Thus, while there has been a marked growth in real net pensioner income since the early 1980s and a fall in the number of pensioners below the poverty line (Hills and Stewart 2005), there remain substantial inequalities among the retirement age population (Hills, 2004; ONS/DWP, 2005). To quote Hills: