JEREMY HUNT is pushing pensioners, those with caring responsibilities and disabled people back to work while abolishing the lifetime allowance limit on pension taxes to encourage them to stay.

The Chancellor said today that the plans for the allowance as well as the pension tax-free allowance, announced in his Budget as increasing by 50 per cent, will help stop NHS workers leaving their posts “when they are needed most.”

Mr Hunt also set out three steps to encourage older people back into work: enhancing the existing Mid-life MOTs Strategy, introducing apprenticeships targeting over-fifties and reducing the training lengths of its skills programme for those with experience.

He also unveiled benefit sanctions reforms aimed at getting people on universal credit into employment.

Part-time workers will also receive more work coach support alongside a “more intensive conditionality regime,” he said.

However, Carers Trust chief executive Kirsty McHugh said that the government had “once again ignored millions of unpaid carers across the UK, many of whom have been forced to cut back on hours or give up employment to care for loved ones.”

“If the government finally put forward a long-term strategy to tackle the social care crisis, they would find an army of unpaid carers ready to fill job vacancies across the country,” she said.

Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson criticised the Chancellor for lacking a “serious long-term strategy” on pension tax policy.

He said that Mr Hunt should have instead changed public-sector pension schemes, saying: “There is a case for raising annual and lifetime allowances, reversing last 13 years of policy.

“But [it] won’t have much effect on employment and [will be] damaging.”

Labour MP Jon Trickett said that the incentives “don’t tackle the underlying problems.”

“They don’t shift the balance of wealth and power in this country in favour of working people,” the leftwinger said.