End of life charity wants government to give terminally ill people early pensions
A new ‘explainer’ from Understanding Society describes how Marie Curie, which provides nursing and hospice care, has used Understanding Society data in a report and campaign on pensions.
The report, Poverty at the end of life in the UK, by Juliet Stone and Donald Hirsch at the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, says more than 90,000 people a year experience poverty during the last year of their lives.
Their research shows that:
- if people died at pension age, three quarters did not experience poverty in the last five years of life
- if they were of working age, the majority experienced poverty at some point in their last five years.
It also showed that a “substantial minority move below the poverty line in the last two years of life, or experience movement in and out of poverty”, and that people in minority ethnic groups were “particularly likely to move into poverty at the end of life, or to be consistently in poverty”.
The charity used the research in a campaign calling on the government to start paying state pensions early for people who are diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Read Marie Curie’s Poverty at the end of life in the UK
Read more about Marie Curie’s campaign
Download the case study: Marie Curie pension campaign uses Understanding Society
This report uses Understanding Society data Waves 1-9, the Family Resources Survey, mortality rates from the Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, and local area data on poverty from the Indices of Multiple Deprivation
Health and wellbeingIncome and expenditureMoney and financesPolitics and social attitudes
