I’ve easily found £30bn of savings, so why can’t the government do this?

I agree with you, I’ve had same idea but I’d make the threshold the HRT.
I’d also close DB schemes in public sector to new entrants & further accrual. I’d offer wage rises now to appease workers.
CGT on homes

@OwnGravityField I am a pensioner. I paid NI for 45 years (I didn't retire till my late 60s.)

So you can't seriously suggest that pensioners now can forgo their pensions when we have contributed to it for decades.

And don't forget that we already pay tax NOW on anything just over the threshold for basic taxation (threshold being just under £13Kpa.)

So our pensions are being taxed now.

My widowed mother pays tax when her own state pension plus my late father's (small) occupational pension is included. Previously she never paid tax in her life.

I asked your beloved chatGPT why your proposal won’t work and this is what it told me. I hope people learn how to use these AI quickly as this thread shows how dangerous it is in the hands of the naive.

There are plenty of reasons why this proposal — though well-intentioned — could be seen as ridiculous or deeply problematic, both practically and politically. Let’s unpack them clearly:

🧮 1. It’s administratively
unworkable

The state pension is currently universal, meaning it’s simple and cheap to administer — everyone gets it automatically once they qualify.
Your proposed means-testing system would require:

• Annual verification of every pensioner’s income from all sources (private pensions, dividends, rent, etc.)
• Constant adjustments to their payments as their circumstances change
• A new bureaucracy to monitor, verify, and audit this information

👉 That would cost billions to run, eat into savings, and create endless disputes, errors, and appeals.

💸 2. It would
destroy simplicity and trust

Part of the success of the UK State Pension is that everyone feels they’ve earned it by paying National Insurance. Making it conditional breaks that link and turns it into a means-tested benefit, which:

• Stigmatizes recipients (“welfare” rather than “earned pension”)
• Deters people from saving for retirement — because extra savings reduce your state pension
• Creates resentment among those who’ve paid in but get less back

👉 It undermines the social contract that sustains public support for the system.

⚖️ 3. It creates a
perverse savings penalty

Withdrawing 50p of pension for every £1 of private income above £12,000 means:

• A 50% effective marginal tax rate on top of income tax and possibly council tax support tapers
• So someone earning £1 extra could lose 70p+ in total — worse than working-age disincentives
• This discourages saving and work among older people

👉 Economically irrational — it punishes thrift and rewards not saving.

📉 4. The “£30 billion savings” is almost certainly
wildly overstated

To save that much, you’d have to:

• Assume zero administrative cost
• Ignore behavioural effects (people adjusting income to stay below £12,000)
• Include wealthy pensioners’ entire SP value as “savings,” though many would find legal or financial ways to minimise losses

Realistic estimates (from IFS and OBR-type modelling) suggest such means-testing might save a fraction of that, maybe £5–10 billion at best — before bureaucracy and avoidance eat it up.

🧓 5. It’s
political suicide

You’d be:

• Taking away benefits from a highly motivated, politically dominant voter group (older, wealthier pensioners)
• Creating administrative chaos for 12 million people
• Turning a popular, universal benefit into a contentious one

No government would survive that — even if the economics made sense.

💬 6. It misunderstands
why
universality exists

Universal pensions aren’t a “handout to the rich”; they’re a social insurance — like the NHS:

• Everyone contributes and everyone receives
• The redistributive effect happens through the tax system, not by cutting entitlements directly

If you want the rich to contribute more, the clean fix is taxing pension income more progressively, not dismantling the universal state pension.

✅ In short:
The proposal sounds efficient on paper, but in practice it’s:

• Bureaucratically unworkable
• Economically self-defeating
• Politically impossible
• Socially divisive

That’s why most economists, actuaries, and policymakers consider such a plan a fiscal fantasy — not a credible reform.

OP.

Please would you share how you are saving for your pension?

How much are you contributing to the government's pot of money?

So correct me if I’m wrong but roughly it would be:

£12k SP only, no tax
£24K SP and private pension, 20% tax paid on the £12k over tax threshold
£24k - £36k 20% tax plus 50% SP ‘tax’ on this band, 70% altogether
£36 - £50k back to 20% tax again for this band
£50k - £100k 40% tax on this band

You’ve got to see OP that it makes no sense to gouge the pensioners most who are only just above the equivalent of minimum wage? And I don’t see how you’re working out that doctors, teachers etc would be barely affected, unless you are saying their pensions are so big that the overall effect isn’t much on them.

I think those that work hard and save hard would leave the UK.

Those that think working is too hard will be left to fend for themselves.

Capital Gains Tax on that lot

The number of posters who want to provide numerous disincentives to work is amazing.

Ask Chat GPT where does the magical pension pot of money come from … or try doing some thinking yourself. My own analysis of your policy - never mind the bruising at the ballot box for the Party that leads on this policy, this is a rally call for insurrection.

HRTWT
i will just stop working now then - get UC and get a state pension when I’m retired.
Nice.

I recently retired and while I like browsing on here and contributing to debates I am sometimes taken aback and even a little upset at the ageism some people express. I see myself as a person first and foremost rather than a "pensioner" with all the negative connotations that the word can have. I still pay income tax, in fact I have now been paying income tax for about 50 years and will pay it until I die. So i do feel that I still contribute to the economy even though I am in the eyes of many a disgusting drain on society who has outlived their usefulness

Oh lovely - another "let's pick on the pensioners" thread. 🙄

I'm sorry but I've got to laugh. ChatGTP is rubbish with stats and it can't access up to date stats.

God help the poor pensioners if they have to deal with something similar to the poorly designed and implemented UC system. It was meant to be fully implemented by 2017 its still not fully implemented and it relies on antiquated systems. For example anyone self employed has to manually add data (every single transaction) despite HMRC implementing making tax digital. It's a crap system.

Ah, but the letter you get tells you that they will take the £100 (that's what the wfa is this year, it's not £200 per pensioner) back if your combined (state and private gross income) is above £35k.

I know because I had the letter on Friday.

Oh op, you’re aware that ChatGPT tells you what you want to hear, not the truth.

You sound very very naive with your understanding of economics

Indeed. I've seen utter bollocks rdesponses from Chat gpt several times in the past 2 days.

What the "idea" utterly fails to take into account is the many issues people on this thread have raised. Governments think about this sort of thing all the time - it's really difficult!

I don't understand why all pensioners have just been given £200 towards winter heating. They are the ones with surplus money who all got given cheap houses which are now worth at least ten times more.
The triple lock on pensions should be stopped immediately as well.
Get a government in who wants to fix the country. Both labour and conservatives have failed the working class.

I have earned every single penny of my state pension. It is bad enough that those who don’t work at all (I am not talking about those who can’t work) just get topped up by the state anyway. Where is the incentive to flog your guts out until 67 if they are just going to take EVEN MORE from you.

That's what most people with any sense would do, isn't it? It's so easily avoided as a "tax".

Totally wrong. Even if they're multi millionaires, they've still paid for their state pension over the years. There's better ways to save a paltry 30 billion. Yes, paltry, considering the govt fritters away around £1.5 Trillion each year !!

I am someone who has saved enough into private pensions to fall into the camp of losing my entire state pension under your proposal. Having afforded my level of pension contributions by living a fairly frugal lifestyle, I don't think your proposal is fair. Pretty certain it would be political suicide too.

However, I do agree that better off pensioners (including me when I become one) should contribute more. I'm not sure why pensioners don't pay any NI on pension income (many having probably saved some on the way in via salary sacrifice). Yes NI has gone towards earning pension credits - but it's all treated like a giant bucket anyway. Personally, think NI should be applied to all income or, even simpler, get rid of the distinction and just have income tax. Government could raise the personal allowance a bit to offset for the less well off- should be about £15k now if it hadn't been frozen.

Dang! If only the government knew how to work ChatGPT innit! In fact, if only Starmer knew how go work ChatGPT, he could fire Rachel Reeves and her team which could save quite a bit I'd think

And with tax bands remaining frozen that isn’t going to remain the case for very much longer.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62lnzdndkeo.amp

Absolute nonsense. You think there’s no understand of what a state provides for its citizens and what they then undertake in return?

What about people who have paid voluntary NICs to qualify for full state pension? Do they get a refund, and if so does that mean you refund everyone’s contributions? It’s not a policy you can easily implement overnight, it would need to be phased in, and what changes would you make to how NI contributions work?

This thread is a great example of the dangers of AI 😂

Exactly and a £12,000 private pension is not a big pension.