LABOUR has said Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s budget giveaway of a £1 billion tax break for pensioners will benefit only the wealthiest 1 per cent of Britain’s retirees – and Labour will reverse it.

But the country’s biggest pensioners’ organisation has called for a “comprehensive debate on the future of pensions” as millions of older people struggle to make ends meet.

Labour said the £1bn tax giveaway would benefit only people with a pension pot of £1.07 million for their old age.

But the average amount saved in pension plans is only £107,000.

Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner said: “Someone starting out their career today would have to work until the year 2423 before they’d see a penny from the Tories’ tax giveaway to the top 1 per cent.

“At a time when families across the country face rising bills, higher taxes and frozen wages, this is the wrong priority at the wrong time.”

She said that Labour would also freeze council tax and impose a windfall tax on oil and gas giants to “ease the cost-of-living crisis facing so many.”

National Pensioners’ Convention general secretary Jan Shortt said millions of pensioners would continue to struggle to make ends meet for “as long as the state pension remains inadequate.”

She called for “a comprehensive debate on the future of pensions.

“All older people deserve to be able to retire in the knowledge that the money they have paid in will actually make a difference when they are no longer in work,” she said.