Ending the winter fuel allowance for pensioners has proved to be a very unpopular decision. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is right to have made it, however, and the arguments for ending the winter fuel allowance extend beyond that single handout. There is another pensioner benefit which burdens the Treasury: the free bus pass. At £715m in 2023, Reeves ought to take the marginal flak and abolish it altogether too. The profligacy of pensioners must no longer be financed by thieving from young people and indebting children and the unborn.
The elderly have a favourite reply to any proposal to take away their handouts and it is this: ‘I’ve paid in all of my life; I’m entitled to get what I paid in out’. I am very sympathetic to this argument. If you paid for a bus fare and then the driver refused to let you on, you’d be rightly furious. I suspect this is how pensioners see any proposal to end their free bus passes. However, the problem with this argument for the average pensioner is they have not made a net contribution to the welfare state. The Resolution Foundation estimates the average person born between 1946 and 1966 has or will take £1.20 out of the welfare state for every £1 they have paid into it.
That overspend of 20p on the pound for each pensioner is partially embodied in our national debt of £2.5tn, equating to £37,613 per person, the highest tax burden since Clement Atlee. A relevant analogy concerning free bus passes then is a pensioner getting a policeman to steal the fare off a working man, or, a pensioner paying for their fare on the credit card of a random child. This is wrong. In practice, the injustice of this wealth redistribution can be partly stopped by trimming back expenditure on pensioners until it meets what they have paid in.
Some, such as James Whale, may reply to this by saying the overspending of politicians is not pensioners' fault, so they should still get what they were promised. The problem with this reply is it simply assumes the consequences of politicians overpromising should fall to young generations in higher taxes. Why should it though? If the policeman originally promised to get the pensioner her bus fare this would hardly warrant his thievery of it; politicians making the same promise to thieve from the unborn when they come into existence is no warrant for it either.
I suspect the second argument about how pensioners need the free bus passes to keep socialising will now be deployed instead. This is dubious at best. The bottom quintile of pensioners spends approximately 17% of their annual income on restaurants, hotels, recreation, culture, alcohol and tobacco. This equates to just over £2,000. Now, the average concessionary bus pass has about 65 journeys taken on it, which, assuming pensioners would have to pay £5 for a return journey, comes to £325 in cost. The average pensioner would only need to trim a small fraction of their leisure expenditure to accommodate the abolition of free bus travel. And it should be noted that between 35-40% of free journeys are for seeing friends and family.
The vast majority of pensioners clearly do not need a free pass, indeed, those who genuinely need a free pass must be a very small cohort. Pensioners can always sell their homes and move to somewhere in the centre of a town, or shop online, or carry on working as 1.47m over 65s do, to get the money to pay for a bus fare. And for the overwhelming majority of those who do not own a home or cannot work, a point must be made: after 45 years of time to plan retirement, allowing for many setbacks, the buck must ultimately stop with you.
Why should people who have worked hard and foregone holidays, meals out and new clothes to build up their private pension be forced to pick up the tab for pensioners who have never saved a penny? A natural principle of human respect dictates people are fully entitled to their private property, the embodiment of their hard work and luck and the means through which they achieve their flourishing in later life. The private pension pot of people should be treated as sacrosanct.
Free bus passes are just another way for baby boomers to offload their share of the national debt onto children and the unborn. Reeves has rightly revoked their winter fuel allowance. It’s time to end free bus passes as well. Any arguments to keep them are nothing but another set of pleas for handouts from a generation that has had enough of them already.
Image: Flickr/HM Treasury
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