IT IS understandable that the Government wants to encourage older people back into the workplace.

The pandemic created a situation where some people have retired earlier, taken on caring roles, or have lost good jobs through redundancy or business failure.

Life expectancy, having risen in the past decades, has fallen; in Scotland it’s worse than the rest of the country: males 76, females 80.

As the age you can expect to claim your state pension stretches further and further away (age 66 now, rising to 67, threatened to increase to age 68), the years a person will claim their state pension are in danger of converging.

With these statistics, the average person will be retired barely a decade if they’re lucky – a sobering thought.

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Under the guise of preventing consultants leaving the NHS, this Government has chosen to create a gold rush pension bonanza for the richest in our society.

Reports suggest the abolition of limits to pension savings will encourage a couple of hundred consultants per year to stay in work, though may also backfire and encourage others to bulk their pension pots and fly off into the sun.

For the rest of the population lower down the food chain, the choice is less optimistic. . . being at risk of a longer working life, short sharp retirement, with unpredictable inflation wiping out hard-earned savings.

Surely this is lazy budgeting. Yes, the unfair loophole making it unreasonable for consultants to work more should be addressed.

But why include the highest-paid civil servants, businessmen and politicians?

There are, surely, more deserving groups campaigning for pension and workplace fairness.

The 1950s WASPI women, many thrown into poverty, victim of the DWP poor communication of pension delay?

Or the junior doctors, our consultants of the future, working at the coal face of the NHS, being paid less than a sous chef in a fast-food restaurant?

The politicians we vote into power come and go.

Do you think, as they reflect on the decisions they make, they should feel an uncomfortable nagging of guilt?