Have this week's events brought good news or bad for older
people?
By Rebecca Law, Media and PR officer
This was a bad week for pensioners living on a
fixed income as figures published by Prudential revealed that
inflation cuts the real value of their funds by 60%. We have
commented before on how pensioners are hit hardest by inflation,
which is higher for food and fuel.
Older people need to keep their room temperatures higher than
younger people to stay healthy and are also, perhaps because of
problems with mobility, likely to spend a lot more time indoors,
pushing the proportion of their income they spend on these up even
further. In effect, this means, according to research by Age UK,
that while average annual inflation recorded by the Retail Prices
Index has been 3.1% a year since January 2008, pensioners have
suffered annual inflation of 4.6%.
The figures lay bare the potential crisis we have on our hands
since someone retiring this year on an annual income of £16,600,
would find the same figure to be worth only £6,700 in 20 years
time. You can read more about this in
this Daily Express piece.
Still, this was at least a good week for James
Bond, Jay Kay, Paris Hilton and anyone else with a soft spot for a
stylish motor. Now, as you get older, you'll no longer have to
worry about trading style for practicality as 38-year-old engineer,
Andrew Wylie, has created a range of mobility scooters modelled on
some of our most iconic vehicles. Scooters which look like a Jeep
and a classic Land Rover are apparently already on sale and "The
Harley Davidson, particularly, is causing quite a stir". At 8mph,
the scooters, obviously, don't have the speed of their full-size
counterparts but does mean they're ideal, as Wylie claims, "if
you're looking for a disability vehicle ...[that you] don't need a
licence to ride". Check out
this article in the Daily Mail to take a look.
