ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the factors which may impact on the likelihood first of entitlement existing, and then of take up occurring. The relationship between population circumstances and take up rate ought not to relieve the Pension Service and its political masters of ultimate responsibility for non-take up but rather to reinforce that policy must be adapted to population which it seeks to serve. Though the baby boomer generation, conceived and born in the immediate post Second World War period is close to official retirement age, the stock of the pensioner population was born under the pre—Beveridge welfare state. State benefits, and in particular the Basic State Pension, form the most important part of the incomes of the majority of pensioners. Given the predominant lack of labour income and the reliance on income from the state, there has often been a presumption that pensioners' incomes, though often low, were stable.
