A major impetus behind the pension campaign in the 1930s was the conviction that substantial poverty existed among the retired, but that it was hidden behind both the inadequacy of official statistics and the silent, stoical endurance of old people themselves. A universal pension, ‘adequate’ in amount, would reach behind this veil of self-respect and lift all old people out of poverty. Radical pension campaigners also believed that a pension adequate in amount to fund an ‘honourable retirement’ would recognise the citizenship worth of old people: it would be a reward from the state for a lifetime of service working in the labour market or in the home. In effect, it was a continuation of the late nineteenth-century demand for the ‘endowment’ of old age as of right.

Deployed against this view was the stern, unbending line taken by the Treasury, whose officials argued that only a small minority of pensioners were in poverty – roughly 10 per cent – and for them adequate support existed in the form of payments disbursed by the Public Assistance Committees (in effect, Poor Law relief renamed in 1929). The Treasury's prime concern in the 1930s was to contain public expenditure in accordance with the deflationary economic philosophy of the National government. But there was also an inherent logic to its view that implementing an across-the-board increase in the basic pension for all would be simultaneously wasteful and inefficient: it would provide an excess of income for those pensioners with jobs, savings or help from family, friends and neighbours; yet it would be insufficient for those with no resources other than the pension.