The cost of introducing this change, £114.4 million per year, is 0.1% of the annual State Pension bill and just £4 million more than the Department for Work and Pensions spent on overpaying the State Pension in error last year. The charity also highlights that most people who die in working age have paid their national insurance contributions for 24 years.
Dr Juliet Stone, Senior Research Associate at the CRSP, who led the research, says: 'This latest work demonstrates that the simple and cost-effective measure of giving working age people with terminal illness access to the State Pension could be a highly effective policy to reduce the risk of poverty for people at a time when they are already extremely vulnerable, both personally and financially.'
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Transformative policy change for families affected by terminal illness could be delivered at a minimal cost to the taxpayer
New research from the Centre for Research in Social Policy, funded by the end of life charity, Marie Curie, shows that giving this group early access to their State Pension could almost halve their rate of poverty across the UK, lifting more than 8,600 dying people out of poverty every year.