Leaving aside Child Benefit that is paid on behalf of 12.8 million children, retirement pensioners constitute Britain's largest group of benefit recipients (DSS, 1999i). Some 18% of the population (10.8 million people) were over pensionable age in 1998, and the income maintenance benefits that they received, worth £44.6 billion, accounted for 46% of social security expenditure. Approximately 16% of pensioner units also received disability benefits. Women account for 64% of pensioners.

The number of pensioners has increased steadily over the last 30 years, adding 3.3 million people (44%) to the retirement pension caseload between 1971 and 1998 (Figure 21.1). Indeed, social security and social assistance spending on elderly people increased by 103% between 1973 and 1998/99, and accounted for 42% of the total rise in social security expenditure (Evans, 1998). While the growth in numbers was large in absolute terms, it was exceeded in proportional terms by rises in the number of unemployed and disabled people claiming benefit.

Pension provision in Britain

Retirement, and the pension provision that underwrites it, are phenomena of the 20th century. In pre and early industrial economies people continued in employment until almost the end of their lives. However, increased longevity, combined with expectations of high productivity in employment that some older workers find difficult to sustain, have created an economic need and social taste for a period of worklessness at the end of life. When pensions were first introduced in Britain for people aged 70, the average period of retirement was less than two years.