Friday 2 September 2011

Good week/bad week

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.

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