rural pensions

This article reveals the development of a long term time bomb, which will have a major impact on rural communities arising from the current recession. It explains

“The decline in the number of people contributing to their pension pots has wiped thousands of pounds off the value of individuals’ retirement income, the pensions and insurance company Prudential warned.

Of those whose have stopped paying into a private pension, a third have done so because they are out of work while over a quarter say that they can no longer afford to make the contributions. Almost half of those who have stopped paying said that they do not plan to start again.”

We seem obsessed with criticizing the “soft” arrangements those in the public sector have in terms of their pensions without ever getting onto the broader canvass of how we really, particularly in these recessionary times, make all sectors of the workforce put away sensible provision for their old age.

It seems to me that this recession is increasingly divisive in the way it focuses us all on every person for themselves. Whilst we are having our own petty races in the car park the main event, in terms of life altering global economic structural change, with all its implications for rural and urban communities, public and private sector employees, individual parts of the UK and the whole nation itself, is going on in the main auditorium. I suspect we are dangerously obliviously to it!