“The government stands accused by a leading Tory thinker of creating a “country for older generations” in which pensioners benefit from constantly rising incomes while the young, their families and children pay the price of punishing policy decisions, including cuts to their tax credits.

In a hard-hitting intervention on the eve of what is expected to be a tempestuous House of Lords debate over plans to slash the incomes of millions of low-income families, former Conservative minister and prominent party intellectual David Willetts says the current policy mix is manifestly unfair and breaks the supposed “social contract” between generations. …”

http://gu.com/p/4dtty

This is the latest of several articles with a similar theme recently which seems to hint that some, or all, universal pensioner benefits (bus passes, winter heating allowance, free TV licences for over-75s, protected state pension increases) may be for the chop.