The Conservative party has claimed that pensioners will be facing inflation rates of up to 5.6 percent.
Rising inflation will see Britain's pensioners worse off by £90 each this year, new figures from the Conservative party suggest.
According to the Tories, cohabiting customers will also lose out by £97 overall, due to over-65s being faced with annual price rises of 5.2 to 5.6 percent. In turn, this could lead to many of the group falling in to poverty or debt.
The purported inflation figure is higher than both the current consumer price index (4.4 percent) and analysts' expectations of 2008's peak (five percent). However, the Tories point out that elderly people spend a higher proportion of their income than others on items which have been subject to particularly sharp price rises, such as food and fuel - thus explaining the high rate.
These figures are contained in the party's new An Unfair Britain report, which comes as part of its strategy to portray Labour as having made poverty worse over its eleven years in power.
To this end, shadow chancellor George Osbourne is to make a speech tomorrow to think-tank Demos, in which he points out that the number of people surviving on the lowest incomes has increased since 1997.
Mr Osbourne will say: "The truth is that Gordon Brown's old-fashioned leftist idea that 'only the state can guarantee fairness' has led to a decade of top-down state control policies that have made the country less fair."
