Roll on Austerity Britain, cheers Julian Glover, as he consigns Britain's beleaguered pensioners to a life of isolation and immobility (Pensioners crush bus services, 7 February). Already in receipt of Europe's lowest pensions, savaged by mis-selling and pension holidays, forced to live in the sticks by crazy house prices and urged to work till we drop, we are now to blame for our lousy transport infrastructure. In an era of £50m footballers and billionaire bankers, us wrinklies, down at the foot of the food chain, need to shape up and shell out pronto if we want to see our loved ones, or catch a library or a day centre before it closes.

This is of a piece with bashing benefit claimants, defenestrating the NHS, attacking local government, dislocating education and waffling about a "big society". If we had a sensible flat-fare policy, there would be a far greater take-up of bus use by all strata of society, easing congestion and providing a greener environment. We may be all in this together, but some are further in it than others.

Jas Weir

Carshalton, Surrey

• Just what we need, a well-paid member of the chattering classes advocating that others less fortunate should take another economic hit in a recession; doubtlessly, Julian Glover's life has been a struggle that dwarfs characters in Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. If any of the candidates for mayor of London in the May 2012 elections want to scrap the Freedom Pass, let them put it in their manifesto. They will get a clear answer in the ballot box.

Trevor Jones

London

• By all means discuss the plight of bus services, but when old, sick and disabled people are referred to as "burdens", not only do they feel guilty and depressed, but they also become targets of mistreatment and resentment, fuelled by a sentiment that they "cost money". Don't touch that free bus pass that allows the elderly to cling on to a life worth living. Don't use a vulnerable group as an excuse for poor management.

Dr Margaret Kennedy

London

• Julian Glover's argument fails on three counts. First, the sad fact that some local authorities, such as Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, are ending subsidies tells us that the 30% spending cuts dictated by the chancellor – not pensioners' passes – are hurting local authorities, who are heavily dependent on the Treasury. Specifically, it is low-capacity rural services that will be hit hardest (as we learned from the Beeching rail cuts in 1963). Second, it ignores fuel-duty grants to bus operators (larger than concessionary fares), but also what is by far the largest subsidy for road transport – the provision of infrastructure funded from taxation.

Third and most seriously, it ignores the distinction between financial and economic costs. When pensioners travel at off-peak hours, spare capacity means that the marginal cost to the carrier is close to zero. Nevertheless, since it is financial revenue forgone that matters to private operators, councils are required to reimburse the full amount of concessionary fares.

Professor George Irvin

Soas, University of London

• As the 76-year-old owner of a bus pass and a car, I strongly support Julian Glover's case for tackling the ridiculousness of free bus travel for all over-60s. This should be limited to those in receipt of pension credit, ie those on demonstrably low incomes – and the age threshold should rise in line with that for women's state pension until it reaches 65. There should, however, also be an incentive for car owners to use public transport and reduce pollution and congestion. So why not have a second type of pass, entitling the holder to travel for a flat rate of, say, £1 a journey, which I would happily pay?

Les Masters

Bleadon, Somerset

• Bus passes are not free, they have been paid for out of taxes paid by people who left school at 14 and worked until they were 60 or 65. Stop doing the Con Dems' job and defend pensioners' rights.

Jim McLoughlin

Liverpool Pensioners Association

• Julian Glover makes the same mistake as do my Swiss in-laws, whose mouths have been known to collectively drop open at the apparent generosity of my Freedom Pass. But that lasts only for as long as it takes me to explain how extraordinarily ungenerous the UK state pension is in comparison to that which they, and nearly every other European citizen, can expect to receive. And could it be that the advice of the Commission for Integrated Transport was ignored because they too were missing the point – that the bus pass isn't meant to put money into transport, it is meant to put money into pensioners. Or rather to liberate them from the horrible possibility of having to disqualify themselves from continued active participation in society simply for want of the bus fare.

Meanwhile my own slightly younger associates find that their eligibility for the Freedom Pass is already edging away beyond their 60th birthday in line with women's state pension eligibility. Please discuss – but sensibly.

Alan Crump

London

• Julian Glover is right to worry about rural buses running around empty, but the reason is due to lack of coordination rather than changing travel patterns. In Switzerland, there is a dense network of bus services, even in remote rural areas, which carry a fair load of passengers. The reasons are not hard to find. The services run regularly all and every day. There are well-advertised connections with other buses and trains. Passengers pay one fare for one ticket for each journey, however many changes that entails. We could do that here in Britain, providing we think in terms of a national travel network, rather than allow individual operators to cherry-pick lucrative local passenger flows and ignore the rest.

Chris Barker

London

• Julian Glover makes a lot of very relevant points. Yes, the introduction of free pensioner travel did not appear to have been well thought through but, as he says, the political likelihood of its withdrawal or replacement by, say, a flat-fare scheme is virtually nil. However, free concessionary travel should not be regarded as support for the bus industry, but social assistance for the elderly population, as most bus operators do not receive a fair payment for the cash fares that they have to forgo. 

Taking Department for Transport's figures for the 10 years up to 2009-10, there has been an increase in support for English bus operations of £1,4bn, the increase in concessionary-fare support payments being £538m. The real elephant in the room is the support for London bus operations, which has grown from £1m to £690m in 10 years, dwarfing the payments made in the non-metropolitan authorities of £253m in 2009-10. Whereas the grant for London's buses comes directly from the exchequer, local authorities have to find their public transport support payments out of their total budgets.

The lesson is that unless we develop a proper transport policy with minimum standards of service, especially in rural areas, we are going to see a dramatic reduction in the coverage of rural England by our bus service network, on a bigger scale than the shrinkage of our railway network in the 1960s.

Barry Moore

Ipswich

• I used my senior bus pass to go shopping yesterday and then went into the brand new Rye library to surf the internet and to borrow some books, feeling content that such facilities still exist despite the cuts taking place. Then I read my favourite paper and find one of your columnists complaining about over-60s getting bus passes and another suggesting that libraries have been made obsolete by computers and ebooks (Peter Preston, 7 February). Clearly, social interaction and freedom to travel are not high on their list of priorities. I just give thanks to Rye library that I can still read well -designed beautiful books and also use the internet when needed. Good libraries with skilled staff like ours are are part of our social fabric and despite my surname, I'm heartened that in Rye at least we are not yet bookless.

David Bookless

Rye, East Sussex

My generation of women face severe financial losses without the time to prepare. This is about fairness, decency and trust

Like Barbara Bates, who has launched a petition against this government's unfair increases to women's state pension age, I am one of half a million women born between 1953 and 1954 who will be confronted by real hardship by this government's U-turn on its coalition agreement. For me, it means working a further 22 months before I can draw a state pension and for some women it will be an extra two years. That's why I'm asking the government to think again.

I started working at 16 and have worked full-time ever since, apart from a brief period of part-time work when I was caring for my mother. For most of my working life I expected to draw a pension at 60 but accepted the increase that was established by the 1995 Pensions Act, which set my current retirement date as July 2018. I would be 64 years and two months old.

But having to wait an extra 22 months at such short notice before I can retire and draw a state pension is not something I expected or had planned for. I work in a very physically demanding job, at a dry cleaners, for 46 hours each week just to make ends meet. I have never had the means to save for a private pension. When I started work, private pensions were not readily available for ordinary workers. We paid our contributions and assumed that we would draw a state pension and that would be sufficient.

Due to my circumstances I know that full retirement is no longer an option. My plan was to greatly reduce my hours when I received my pension and return to part-time work. Now I estimate that I would need to save at least £12,000 just to be able to work part-time from the age of 64. After deductions, I take home £270 at the end of the week and am struggling like everybody else with the rising costs of living. Saving anything is impossible. I will not be able to continue working these demanding hours until the age of 66 and I am deeply worried about my future.

During the recent Oldham East byelection I spoke to a Liberal Democrat canvasser about this issue and was told that I should count myself lucky to have a job at all and didn't I realise that there were thousands of people worse off than me. But I am not a lazy woman who is moaning because I can't put my feet up for another year or so. This is about fairness, decency and trust.

Most people argue that it is only fair that the state pension age is the same for men and women – and I agree. What I do not accept is how the goalposts have been moved again with so little warning. Women of my generation have faced years of inequality in the workplace. Many took time out from their careers to raise families and on average we have earned much less than our male counterparts. We have simply not had the same opportunities to build up private pensions and now we are facing severe financial losses, between £10,000 and £15,000 each, without the time or opportunity to prepare. I hope that people can understand the drastic impact that these rapid changes will have on our lives. Please support the 500,000 women who will be drastically affected by these changes by signing the petition.

Women between 56 and 57 years old will have their retirement age moved without sufficient time to prepare

Last week I spoke to Barbara Bates, who works in the office at a funeral care business in County Durham. Barbara was born in April 1954 – she is 56. Until a month ago Barbara was looking forward to retiring in seven years time. By her 64th birthday, she would have been working for 49 years.

Barbara has osteoarthritis in her thumbs and wrists, and the lifting and cleaning work that she does causes her pain. Barbara, like many women affected by the changes in the state pension age proposed by the government, feels let down. She told me that reaching retirement "feels like a mountain I have to climb which keeps getting higher. The government have robbed me of two years of freedom. And of £10,000 of pension which I have been working for since I was 15".

Barbara is one of 500,000 women who, under the government's plans, will have to wait for more than a year longer than previously envisaged before receiving their state pension. Of those half a million women (all born in 1953 and 1954), 300,000 will have to wait 18 months longer while 33,000 women, unlucky enough to be born between 6 March and 5 April 1954, will see an increase of exactly two years until they can draw their state pension, and with just seven years to prepare and plan.

All parties recognise that the state pension age should be increased. Average life expectancy is increasing for men and women of all backgrounds, and to afford decent pensions in retirement and to ensure the costs are manageable, change is needed. This principle was established in the 1995 Pensions Act, which set out the timetable for increasing women's state pension age from 60 to 65 between 2010 and 2020, giving those women affected 15 years to prepare. Labour's 2007 Pension Act, following the recommendations of the Turner report on pensions, set out a timetable for increasing the state pension age for both men and women to 66 by 2026 (and then to 67 by 2036 and 68 by 2046). Again these changes gave men and women the time they needed to prepare.

In May, the Tories and Lib Dems announced they would review this timetable again, but appeared to recognise the importance of timing. Indeed, the coalition agreement explicitly stated that "the parties agree to… hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women".

The government's draft legislation, published a couple of weeks ago, performs a now familiar U-turn on their commitment, and accelerates the equalisation timetable to 65 by 2 years, to start in 2016, to be completed by 2018. The state pension age will then start to rise, for men and women, beyond 65 from 2018, reaching 66 by 2020. These changes will do nothing to reduce the budget deficit in this parliament, as the savings won't kick in for five years.

The loss in terms of pension income for a woman who has to wait an extra two years is more than £10,000. For the poorest pensioners, those on the full pension credit, the loss is closer to £15,000. Women are already at a significant disadvantage relative to men when it comes to pensions. This generation of women has tended to earn far less during their working lives, they were often prohibited from joining a private pension scheme when they started working (part-time workers were only allowed to join many pension schemes in the 1990s) and have had interrupted careers which gave them less chance to build up a pension outside the state system. This group is ill-equipped to make the adjustments now being forced on them, especially when many have made changes to hours and incomes based on their fast-approaching expected retirement date.

There is an alternative that would address the issue of increasing longevity, but in a fair way: no change before 2020, as the coalition agreement promised, followed by an increase in the state pension age for men and women to 66 between 2020 and 2022. This would affect 1.2 million fewer people than under the new plans, and would affect men and women equally. It would deliver £20bn of savings for the government, but with no-one being put in the unacceptable position of having an increase in state pension age of more than a year, with such little time to prepare.

Labour will oppose the rushed changes. It is right that men and women have the same state pension age, but these are unacceptable costs for getting us there more quickly.

So I urge the government to rethink, and address increasing longevity in a fair and rational way that does not rob women aged 56 and 57 of their retirement income. The government must open their eyes and ears not just to the arguments that are put before them in parliament, but to the women that are being so badly hit. Because Barbara Bates is speaking for every one of those 500,000 women when she says "we have worked hard all our lives and never asked for anything. Just as we start to see light at the end of the tunnel it is snatched away".