To think pensions need huge reform?

Benefits should be based on need not nice to have and if we’re looking at pensions, child benefit shouldn’t be immune.

@cityliving99they should scrap NI and have one tax, it’s ridiculous older workers don’t pay Ni

Why should someone on 60k not be entitled to it? Look at how much tax that person pays and the impact of fiscal drag.

Regardless child benefit money won’t resolve the pension issue. Look at the birth rates!

I feel the number of years you contribute, to get a full state pension, needs to go up, not the retirement age. Make a full pension available for those who have paid 45 years and then start tapering it down.
Abolish the system where people can buy back years for next to nothing.
Make everyone pay NI until retirement age. At the moment it discriminates older workers.
This would be fairer

So crime and pressure on the NHS skyrockets. Sounds peachy!

Not if you take all benefits away.

Another major issue is the lack of economic growth

It starts getting smaller if one parent has an income of £60k. A family on an entire income of £60k doesn’t need it, let alone a family with one parent on £60k.

Absolutely and you it’s not rocket science to work out there’s less younger people paying in now to pay for the older generation’s pensions.

@T0mbellerr do you understand how those European pension models work?

I don't think you come from the background I do though, leaving aside the aunties and uncles who have never had a job...lazy fuckers, many people I know who are my parents generation (80s) and slightly younger are struggling:
There were no private pension readily available for the working class, especially the manual workers and unskilled, in the 50s & 60s when they started work.

There were fewer jobs for women and many were very badly paid

The welfare state was new with promises of cradle to grave help so people didn't think they had to worry about a pension

So whilst the middle classes who worked for only a couple of companies, with their final salary pensions, a lot of the people I know, including my generation,50s,moved from job to job, couldn't set up a private pension or found regular payments hard...they will struggle.

Personally I am fortunate in that I was always financially literate... remember there were no adds for financial products in the last century... when I started working a lot of financial advisors were ruthless snake oil salesman only interested in commission..I once was told not to pay the poll tax (a crime) and put the money in the pension I'd bought when I asked if I could defer a payment as I was between jobs having deliberately taken a couple of weeks off before getting another job..full employment has always existed in Bristol

MMT is a political manifesto, it’s not a serious economic theory as it is completely impossible to implement and is based on outdated concepts.

Prior to the baby boomers reaching retirement, pensioners were the group most associated with poverty. But between 1995 and 2010 pensioner incomes doubled in real terms and since then, they have stabilised at that new higher level.
That's partly because of the state pension, which now pays out vastly more than it did in previous generations, when measured as a proportion of median earnings.
Some of today's pensioners still receive money from the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme, a very generous programme that accepted new entrants from 1978 until 2002. It was scrapped as it was deemed unaffordable. Then of course, most receive a basic state pension - which has been bolstered since the early 2010s by the triple lock (a policy that cost far more than ever imagined).
But the other, and perhaps greatest piece of luck was that my generation worked in an era in which employers - public and private - offered membership of defined benefit pension schemes. That meant that through one's career, we earned entitlements to a decent pension set at a fixed proportion of salary.

Regardless, as a country we shouldn’t be aiming to provide an even smaller state pension when we’re already near the bottom with Mexico ranking marginally above.

@Indianajet

It’s due to housing & pension as the schemes that were available then were far more generous.

Nope. You’d be scrapping it just as the generation after the baby boomers starts to retire and they are no where near as well off. Once again the baby boomers get the best of the best and the ladder gets pulled up for all of us who come after.

Child benefit was universal but it no longer is!

1 in 4 are millionaires? Really?
I suppose people living in the South may have properties worth a lot, but there are very few millionaires (none) in my social circle!

The major flaw is this is a lunatic amount of money to come up with.

And again people compare to Europe without understanding the models they have. It’s like apples & pears

It’s not ageist to acknowledge facts. And generational trends don’t ever apply to every single individual in that generation

“the baby boomers are comfortably the richest generation in the UK. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and independent analysts show that the cohort born between 1946 and 1964 holds a dominant share of the nation's total accumulated assets, making them the wealthiest demographic group in British history”

100% agree that the triple lock should be scrapped. The country just can't afford it.

Its Modern Monetary Theory. I think I got the gist of it right. I will go off and do some more research.

I agree op. Pensioners are some of the wealthiest in the country. 1 in 4 are millionaires. They don’t need fuel allowance and free prescriptions. Rattling around in their massive houses.
I realise there are poor pensioners but let’s means test it.
stop giving the rich all the taxes just because they vote and they are now a huge demographic!!

Possibly MP staffers doing public opinion research to inform the autumn statement.