Pensioners get a punishment beating from Labour
The David Vance BriefingRead More
Just call it what it is: a pay cut for people who cannot strike.
From 2030 the pensions earnings ratchet goes. A third of pensioners have no private pension to plug the hole and the Left is betting they will not notice until the damage has already done the damage.
I am talking about pensioners and the so-called “Triple Lock” and today I want to fully delve into this one with you. Now, I have a personal interest as I am of pension age myself so you might say I am biased BUT I think what I am going to say will resonate with millions!
As you know, UK Mayor Andy Burnham has announced that Labour will END the “Triple Lock” should Labour get re-elected at the next general election. In short he has put all UK pensioners on notice. Being a political coward, he calls this “an adjustment” and a “necessary reform”. It’s nothing of the sort. That said, the BBC and other are enthusiastic about this – they see punishing pensioners are as good news story. Fabians and their apologists hate the elderly.
So let’s start off by plainly explaining what the Triple Lock is!
It was first introduced in 2011 by Conservative PM David Cameron and was a three-line pledge: each April the state pension rises by prices, by wages, or by 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest.
By breaking this, the pension will grow more slowly than it was pledged to grow. Now that is a real time cut however you want to look at it.. The only cleverness here is that the cut arrives by stealth, so no government minister ever has to read out a smaller weekly number and sit down.
Now of course not ALL pensioners are in the same position. There will be some (mostly public sector employees) who have a final-salary income, their house paid off, and a Sipp ticking over. That sort of pensioner can survive a meaner formula.
But many others cannot. Don’t they matter? Are we setting up our most vulnerable demographic at the point in their life where they are most helpless?
In the financial year ending 2024, the Department for Work and Pensions’ own answer to Parliament stated that 30% of UK pensioners received no private pension income at all, occupational or personal. One in ten pensioners had no savings. More than 1.2 million retired households are mainly reliant on the state pension and related benefits, roughly 740,000 of them single people. For them the April rise is not some sort of rounding up exercise, it’s the only income rise they will ever get again.
I think I can demonstrate this to you in real terms.. The full new state pension is £241.30 a week this year, about £12,550 per annum. The April 2026 rise was 4.8% because earnings beat inflation. CPI had been 3.8 per cent. If you strip out the earnings dimensions they are short-changed. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has done the longer sum: had the flat-rate pension merely tracked average earnings since 2010, it would be about 12 per cent lower now, roughly £1,500 a year. So this impoverishes pensioners.
Now if you are someone who has an additional private pension then this is an annoyance. On no private pension it is everything. Taking the earnings ratchet away is a decision to stop that gap ever opening in the pensioner’s favour again.
They have form on this. In 2022 the earnings figure was binned because the pandemic had scrambled it, and the pension rose by CPI alone, 3.1 per cent. One distorted year, they said. The lower base is still there. People who were 66 then are 70 now. No rebate for them!. No occupational pension to make up the difference for the ones who never had one. “Temporary” was the dress rehearsal for what is about to become permanent.
Yes, the triple lock costs money. Yes, it ratchets the pension up against wages in a way the forecasts hate, because nobody knows which of the three numbers will win. But that’s not a MORAL argument for abandoning it – thatis a Treasury Preference. The bill for dropping it is not paid by the financially comfortable. It is paid by women with broken contribution records, by carers, by people who spent forty years in jobs that offered no scheme worth having. Auto-enrolment may save their children. It does nothing for them. Lecturing them about intergenerational fairness, from a desk with a defined-benefit promise and a house in the right postcode, is an insult.
There was a historical bargain between Government and the people. National insurance went in and the pension was supposed to move. If you want to, change the terms for people who have not yet paid. But don’t change them, after the event, for people who have paid, and don’t you dare dress it up as prudence while 30% have no private income to shelter behind.
One of the tricks used by politicians is to deploy Averages. Why? Well. pensioners as a class have done better. Housing wealth sits with older owners. But those averages are inflated by the households this change will barely graze, and they conceal the renter whose only income-linked income is the state pension. Means-testing the gap afterwards is not compassion. It is a form, a savings trap, and a punishment for anyone who put a bit by. A flat rise is crude. Crude is why it reaches people who will not hire a lobbyist.
If they are determined to do this, they should at least have the nerve to show us the numbers. Publish the cash gap, year by year, old path against new, for the full pension and the basic pension of £184.90 a week. Name the loss for the pensioner with nothing else. Say who is down £400 and who is down £1,500. This is something they will not do.
The truth of that matter is that this is a government picking a fight with people who have finished their working lives and who cannot strike. For three in ten of them there is no other pension, nowhere to turn.
The Government insists that pensioners will still be protected against inflation and that a new mechanism will preserve the pension’s value relative to average earnings over time. But that is not the same as the existing Triple Lock. The guarantee that pensioners receive whichever is greatest of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5% is being dismantled and replaced with a formula whose long-term consequences are less certain. The Government is asking pensioners to surrender a clear, established protection in exchange for a promise about what will replace it.
Here’s a final thought. It is estimated that only 20% of pensioners voted Labour in 2024. So isn’t this really Labour going to war with a demographic that does not trust and we can see now why that lack of trust is justified!
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