Government making savings at your expense.

I have posted before about the reluctance of Officials of various Government departments to ensure that folks are getting the benefits they are actually entitled to and in most cases have actually paid for but quite by coincidence I have found out about another official scam.

It seems that if your wife has only paid contributions based on the married woman's reduced rate also known as the married woman's stamp or has never worked then she will not receive a pension in her own right. However what the Pension Service advisors don’t tell you is that she can receive a basic state retirement pension of 60% of your entitlement based on your contribution record. She can claim this when you reach your State Pension Age and it doesn’t affect your pension.
I have looked further into this and find that my Wife is entitled to another £5.50 a week pension so a claim letter has gone in today along with a claim for the backdating to my 65th birthday.

With the current national obsession with scroungers and other scoundrels by the wonderful Lib-Con alliance it seems that folks who are quite legitimately entitled to various state benefits will be cheated out of them by a state system that is hell bent on saving money whatever the social cost. There is already a culture of suspicion among those who process various applications and their starting position when applying the rules is that the applicant is on the fiddle and how do we get out of paying them and I fear that this will only get worse.

On the subject of savings is there a danger that the current drive to save money and reduce debt will become such a focus of Ministers that they will not know when to stop. Already we have seen unprecedented financial attacks on Local Government, Education, Aid to Industry, The Arts and many other parts of society. So the danger is that they will become so addicted to cost cutting and saving that like any common drug addict they will eventually self destruct finally achieving their aim of totally disbanding the State machinery by default.