BRITAIN’S PENSIONERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 658, 9 May 1929, Page 9

BRITAIN’S PENSIONERS

ENORMOUS SUM PAID OUT EACH YEAR OTHER POWERS COMPARED British Official Wireless Reed. 11 a.m. RUGBY, Wednesday. In a debate in the House of Commons to-day on the vote for the Ministry of Pensions, Major Tryon, Minister of Pensions, said the vote was still almost the largest single vote for any of our great departments. The Ministry’s work affected the weekly budget of about 1,000,000 families. The number of their beneficiaries was about 1,500,000. At the end of the current year we should have spent since the beginning of the war —that was, in the last 15 years—no less than £913,000,000 on war pensions. He had taken pains to ascertain how this compared with the expenditure of the other great countries, who along with us were most heavily engaged in the Great War. He found that as compared with our £913,000,000, France had spent approximately £500,000,000 and Germany approximately £400,000,000, so that we had spent roughly an amount on pensions equal to those two great countries combined. Unlike other countries, we had adjusted our scale of pensions to meet the enhanced price of commodities, so that the pensioner should not suffer. He. estimated that for the next ten years, the expenditure on pensions would be about £45,000,000 a year.