Quote:
Originally Posted by nomadking
So what makes them poorer once they hit 75?
75 will have been chosen to yield a seemingly affordable cost to the taxpayer. There will have been no other reasoning to the selected age. It was just another unjustified freebie handed out.
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Something Gordon Brown excelled in. This was a relatively low-cost, eye-catching initiative that was supposed to help distract from his failure to ensure the state pension retained its value when compared with both inflation and wages. The licences were never truly free however; the government paid the BBC to make up what it would have lost. Gordon is of course now long gone from the treasury and a somewhat more pragmatic Tory government has refused to cover the cost and told the BBC it was up to them to decide what they wanted to do about it. Making use of pre-existing means testing procedures is the BBC’s reasonably creative solution to the poison chalice they were handed.