Jeff Salway: Grey vote consigned to the periphery during poll campaign

THE taking for granted of the grey vote has been one of the more mystifying features of the election campaigning over the past month.

Pensioners make up a growing proportion of the population, yet the main parties have singularly failed to address the issues specifically affecting older voters, from pensions and tax to long-term care and energy costs.

After his experience in Rochdale last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown will disagree, but the UK's first digital election has seen pensioners cast to the periphery. Yet within a few years, the proportion of the UK's population aged 65 or over will outnumber those aged 16 or younger, according to UK government statistics.

Of course, the manifestos mention the specifics – winter fuel allowances, state pensions, long-term care, council tax, pension credits, transport and energy prices – but such matters have not been taken beyond those pages, according to the National Pensioners Convention (NPC), which has criticised the three main parties for failing to address the concerns of older voters.

It said there was a "huge gap between the demands of older people and the politicians commitment to tackling financial hardship, poor care services and fuel poverty". The exception is the commitment to re-linking state pensions to earnings by 2012, which the Labour government has pledged to implement.

The NPC wants a winter fuel allowance of 500 per pensioner household to help maintain a warm home, but the three main parties only pledge to continue paying the allowance at the present rate. While there is a case for means-testing the benefit, there's also a very strong case for increasing it, with energy prices likely to rise again and many households still paying for higher usage in the harsh winter just gone.

One other issue needs even more urgent attention, yet the silence on it over recent weeks has been deafening. Of the calls and letters I have received from older readers of The Scotsman's Smart Money pages over the past few months, the vast majority have concerned the loss of income from their savings since interest rates fell in late 2008. This has pushed thousands of pensioners to the brink of poverty, but despite the urgency of the problem it has not been addressed by any of the main political parties.

The NPC suggested: "The needs of older voters seem to have been largely overlooked in this election – none of the major parties really know how to engage with pensioners, because they lack a basic understanding of how we live our lives."

Not only have the needs of pensioners been all too briefly addressed, but there has been little discussion of the threat posed to the long-term health of the economy by the ageing population. Pension, medical and benefit costs are among those set to rocket in the coming years and the next administration will need to take decisive measures to address this. What the parties have touched on is removing or raising the default retirement age, with some movement inevitable sooner rather than later as life expectancy improves.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, while acknowledging that all the main parties are looking at extending working lives, has seen little evidence of the long-term strategic planning needed in response to growing demographic and pension pressures. It seems likely that the default retirement age will be at least revised by the next administration, but it's far from certain that any changes will be implemented in the near future, given the pressures on employers as government seeks to cut the public purse deficit.

At election time, the long-term nature of such issues can stymie any attempt to move them up the agenda. However, evidence suggests that government efforts to defuse the demographic time-bomb will fail to improve on the piecemeal approach taken to pensions policy.

The fact that Britons are living longer than ever before should be a positive thing, yet the current system compels people to stop working early and fails to encourage them to save effectively. Consequently, many older voters are consigned to the periphery of society, an impression that our politicians have only reinforced in the past month.