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Never had it so good pensioners?
• WHILE on holiday in London very recently I caught sight of your paper (Should pensioners face means-tested humiliation? October 4).
I am very sorry but I do not understand what your readers are talking about. I spent 30 years of my life in Britain, 11 of them as a draughtsman in London, two years in the post-war RAF and 11 years as a full-time university-educated architect with local authorities in Wales and England.
I received ultimately a weekly pension of £27. This is supposed to be indexed to the rise in the cost of living although, as in Sweden, where I now live, this has been totally dropped for the past 10 to 15 years.
Obviously my English pension has had to take account of my Swedish pension, which are viewed in both directions – as the governments of both countries were socialist at the time of the awards being settled.
I am, however, quite happy as I have to be, to try and live on the amounts I get. However, my wife, after 20 years of producing and looking after four children has a pension of only little more than £40 per month and only approximately 60 per cent of my English pension, as we lived in England for a number of years before emigrating in 1957.
Owing to difficulty with the language in 1958-59, I returned to England where I was employed in the summer of 1958 but since then in Sweden from that year to 1991 when I retired as a city architect for an authority in Greater Stockholm on a salary of about 22,000 Swedish crowns or £1,680 or £33 per week after nearly 50 years’ employment.
These things are seldom spoken out loud, because it is not English to do so. If one is underpaid one is reluctant to admit it.
To be overpaid, as in fact many are, is often accompanied by boasting when we should really be ashamed of it. So I say again: what the hell are these people complaining about?
The sum referred to in your Letters pages of £119.05 or a “minimum income guarantee” simply does not exist.
To prove it I am only too willing to display my bank statement from HSBC for this year.
JOHN ALAN GRIFFITHS
Bergs Hamra,
Solna, Sweden
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