State pension is £7k a year.
That is disgusting. It should be double that at least.
The government should be targeting all the people who are evading tax by working cash in hand, etc. The guy across the road from me has 10 cars and he does 20% discount for cash is an example of how decent amount of additional tax revenues could be raised.
In fact do away with paper cash. Force everyone to do bank transfer and soon questions would be asked why he's receiving thousands of pounds on a weekly basis from strangers.
State pension is low, but there are housing benefit (if they're not homeowners) and pension credit too. So it's already means-tested to a degree. I do support policies that help poor pensioners, but millionaire and home-owner class pensioners don't need more money. They benefited from the greatest housing boom in world history, they can downsize or equity release their homes to pay for their damn retirement. Once that's depleted, they should get help if they need it. The average pensioner is significantly richer than the average worker in this country, literally hundreds of thousands of pounds richer.
And current pensioners benefited massively from low taxation in their lifetime, lower than any country that you'd compare it to that has bigger pensions. The US and Germany have better state pensions, but they also increased taxes in the 1970s and 1980s to run a surplus on the state pension trust fund and invested that to grow for future years where there will be a deficit, because they anticipated the population boom. We didn't do that, our pensioners benefited from low taxes, they can't expect to double-dip by having their pension increased. These are the richest people in society, and have world-leading defined-benefit private pensions as well, with massive tax advantages.
You're not going to raise £110b (cost of doubling state pension) of tax revenue by going after cash-in hand workers. Doubling the state pension means an extra £3500 per year of tax on every working person. On median income, that's a 15% tax increase. Let's make the richest people richer and the poorest poorer, otherwise it's disgusting