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

I wouldn’t vote for this. I’ve already been shafted on so many levels. I’m not going to work until I’m 68 to yet again finance/support everyone around me.

How about we completely get rid of child benefit and charge a nominal sum for schools say 250GBP per year per child. I mean, getting old is an inevitability whereas having kids is a choice.

I am sick of doing the right thing and being penalised for it by the government, I have a job and have been building my pension. Why would I (yet again) be paying for someone else who couldn’t be arsed or spent all their extra money that could have gone into a pension?

What is this social Contract bollocks that people keep coming out with? There’s no social Contract be clear on that. It doesn’t exist.

You can’t say never - that acceptance of downward spiral needs to change

I think we’ll start to see more people who don’t care if they’re called evil- we’re looking at the thin end of the wedge aren’t we - there’ll be no more big society

No, absolutely not. We need to encourage people to save into their private pensions, not disincentivise it.

households with more than £12,000 a year from private pensions, work, or investments

12k a year is really not a lot, and if you are counting households, that's only 6k of pension each for 2 people. This site suggests you need around 13,400 for 1 person, or 21,600 for 2 people, for a minimum standard of living in retirement; 31,700/43,900 for a modest standard. At about 12k per year state pension, you'd need an extra 19k per year for a single person to reach the "modest" standard, so you're targetting people well below that.

I agree.
I have a friend, married couple with children both doing exactly the same jobs as her parents did. Except her mum gave up work when her kids were young, then went back part time. My friend could only afford mat leave off. My friends live in a smaller house in a cheaper part of the country than her parents. Have a similar lifestyle in terms of holidays although both parents work harder for this. Her parents are retired (retired at 60) and have a HIGHER income from pensions they My friend and her husband have from working. So my friend and her husband will never have the lifestyle or money her parents have despite doing the same jobs and working harder at them.
I don't resent her parents luck, good for them. What I do resent is her parents attitude, they are very much in the entitled, 'young people spend all their money on avocados' lot.

ChatGPT has been noted for its wokery, and may well be left-leaning. It’s been trained by ‘progressives’ in California.

Same, I’d rather live in a cave, caravan or tent than go into shared housing.

Australia has a means tested pension.

they had to exclude private pensions from the means testing as people deliberately weren’t investing in them because they knew it would only replace the state pension.

chatgpt is not reliable.

there are countries that do this and you can look at their experience.

this is why the UK won’t do it.

Chat GPT is not a sentient being - it frames an answer based on the phrasing of the question and the vast amounts of data available to it. It predicts an answer - but it doesn’t actually think anything. If you phrase a question differently you will get a different answer. The data and references it uses are sometimes made up.

Your proposal is too drastic, OP. Breaking the contract the state has made with people like this is a violation of good faith and destroys the trust on which governance depends. I would say that the triple lock is too much, but I would like to see our pension rise closer to the G7 average before we do away with it.

As someone predicted to be affected, I agree with @Kendodd that pensioners paying higher rate taxes should be subject to NI. I also think that WFP and similar benefits should be means tested.

Ah right, I get it.
Those that save get penalised, those that don't save for their future or spend their money in their younger years on 'luxury' get rewarded.

Sounds perfect @OwnGravityField .
Can't see any flaws in that at all.

Where do we sign up?

🙄🙄🙄

If that were to be the case I think we should be given the option not to pay for those receiving benefits now so that we can save it for our retirement

YABU. One of the reasons I work, despite my dh being a high earner, is to pay towards my state pension so I can have an independent income in my old age. Why should I then not receive it?

Exactly! It's the reverse of the grasshopper who sang all summer!

Work hard save hard and then get the pleasure of funding the lives of those who haven't, and don't question it or you'll be told you're evil!

Oh do fuck off. People aren’t saving enough for private pensions as it is. This will just disincentivise people around the threshold.

Many will be factoring in the state pension for their retirement plans and having paid all their working life it’s very unfair to then take a significant proportion of their pension away.

Plus the couple in question are Boomers. Hardly anyone currently under age 60 has a final salary pension, the few that do have them they were all reformed to be ungenerous where 40yrs service gets you £8k/yr.

This thread is a great illustration of the folly of relying too much on ChatGPT.

It’s a LLM, not actually ‘intelligent’, and as we see from the way it’s endorsed your proposal, OP, has not received nearly enough training - or is incapable of ‘understanding’ - human psychology. Hence it’s endorsed an approach which seems logical on the face of it, but would actually drive the population to change its behaviour and defeat the purpose of the changes.

In that case the obvious solution is don't treat them, compulsory euthanasia at 65? Solves the pension problem as well.

Ah, you're ageist then - you could've just said that in the first place instead of the ChatGPT shite!

Sorry no, I wouldn’t vote for this. I’ve already been shafted by women’s pension age being uplifted, and the terms of my local authority pension being altered so it’s not as good as it was originally. I have stayed in a job which doesn’t pay as well as it should because it offered me a decent pension. I have factored in the state pension when calculating what I need. So no, this would be a hard no from me. I have worked full time since I left university with minimal maternity leave, I’ve paid my tax and NI for 25 years with another 20 to go. I don’t see why I should be shafted again.

Doesn’t it already cost £5k per person to apply for ILR in the UK? I’m not sure a 90% discount on that would go down will with the far left / right ;)

If one wants to save £30 billion then reforming the NHS along the lines of a European model would get you there. We could also tighten the rules around eligibility to many benefits including universal credit, in-work benefits and disability benefits. That would also help get you there. We could merge NI and income tax, and increase the personal allowance, to ensure than those is work and retired paid the same level of tax on earned and unearned income. That too would probably get you there. We could stop frittering money away on failed infrastructure projects and either take the French approach of ‘build it and sod the NIMBYs) or just not bother. That would also get you there.

Or, we could target a tax at (a) the public sector and (b) those that vote. Yes, that makes perfect electoral sense

No jealousy here; they’re lovely people and I wish them well.