The Pensions Triple Lock has to go

[Flammkuchen]

When it was introduced, the aim of the Triple Lock was to increase pensions faster than earnings as the state pension was low. The TL has been very successful: pensioners now have a higher standard of living and more disposable income than working families. A pensioner couple each getting the full state pension receive £20k per year, with any private pension income on top.

This is great for them, but it comes with a trade-off. In order to increase pensions by over 10% a year, there is less money to pay nurses, teachers or doctors. Highly skilled public sector workers have low pay and there is a recruitment crisis.

AIBU to think that now that on average pensioners have higher disposable income than those in work, a policy that aims to increase pensioner income by MORE than average earnings - and so keep increasing the income of pensioner households faster than working households - needs to be rethought? Even just linking the state pension to average earnings would be better.

The pensions triple lock has to go at some stage - it’s a simple economic fact that as it moves away from earnings it becomes increasingly unaffordable.

It went temporarily last year because its relationship to earnings was deemed too high. Pensions went up 3.1% in April when inflation was running at 7%.

It was a godsend some Wednesday mornings. 🤣🤣

Only if you accept that as a nation we don't care if old people die in (and of) poverty.

Do young people never die of /in poverty? That's good, then.

@Kabalagala by being politically active in whatever field it is you are invested in. You work at building a relationship with all councillor at all levels, parish, town, district and MPs, get them all interested and invested in your area. It's what happens in local politics all the time, every day of the year! And it all filters into national politics, as local votes keep your MP in post!

Nobody’s said that. In fact I said that I’m happy to fund stuff I’m too old to have benefited from

What are you too old to have benefited from? I think you said you had dc & I assume you gave birth via the NHS & didn't go private for their education? I can't think of any benefit that is universal these days that only younger people are eligible for?

- in response to the question as to why someone’s taxes should pay for pensions when they think they won’t get one.

Why do you think the age you receive it won't be pushed out further?

I like winding up the miserable old bats by reminding them that the one thing that money can’t buy them is their health and their looks ☺️

I'll take saggy jowls and a thick waistline any day over your ugly to the bone attitude.

Draw a graph of average earnings, rising at 2% each year, and a line of the average tax take (the largest tax take being income tax which is predominantly paid by earners). Then draw a line of the annual pension, rising at a minimum of 2.5% a year, and you’ll see that at some point in the future, the total pensions bill will consume the entire tax take of this country.

now that’s not going to happen for some time, but to continue to increase the pension when the country’s money available for spending is not rising, and is infact contracting if you look at the rising cost of government borrowing, means reduced money to spend on schools, hospitals etc. Should paying ever increasing pensions be this country’s economic priority?

Do we really have to rerun this again? I’ve explained it at least twice. You’re either being provocative or you have the attention span of a gnat.

I am politically active, I engage with my mp often,i have organised and atteneded protests. I've been on national television twice speaking about the issue i campaign for. I do much less now because I have very little time. But it's entirely unrealistic to expect most people to do more than write to their MP and vote. What you've described sounds like a full time job.
Why are you assuming none of us are politically active?

"I've paid in for fifty years!" blah blah and then this self-righteousness and judgemental attitude about how dare younger people have childcare or heating If that was aimed at me, I didn't say the latter part. I explained that was just how AlarmClock chose to interpret what I did say. I did say the first part, in response to a "you haven't paid anything close to what you will take out" comment. Which was, like no few others, missing many points.

That's the main issue with threads like this. Dissent is always portrayed with a glib "OK Boomer" type response. As I explained way back up thread, the article @Flammkuchen posted uses truly inflammatory words to describe something that just hasn't actually happened. And look - so many leaping in to play some stupid blame game, misrepresenting all sorts of things and taking a high moral ground based on that disinformation.

Division is so easy to sow these days. The point is that many, like me, have been through this before, and we were the Young Turks doing the complaining, blaming anyone and everyone else. We know. We get it. We also know that this blame game is a pointless and often dishonestly aimed (by MSM etc) waste of energy. Step back, see it for what it is. There are very few people 'to blame' and pensioners relying on the pension are not amongst that number.

The apparent naivety of the question you asked about being able to influence MPs and national policy! I responded directly to your question.

And now you reveal that you do/have done something something just like that! So why ask? What was the point of the question? Or did you make your own assumption, that I do bugger all politically and was just blowing hot air?

It isn't a full time job. It does, as you evidently understand, take quite a chunk of time. Who says everybody should do more than wrote letters? You asked a question, I answered it and now you, like AlarmClock before you, are embroidering wholecloth!

I left MN for a while because this Twitter style of overly emotional, wholly internalised, basically dishonest debate pissed me off no end. I've been back about 2 days and am already looking for the exit door again!

I revealed my political activity earlier in the thread i think, or certainly i have mentioned it in similar threads. It is entirely irrelevant to pensions, taxation, money etc so why would I mention it?
While I had only one child I spent hours campaigning, for several years. NOTHING changed. It doesn't work unless you have the majority on your side.
You're being naive in thinking if we all just care a bit more we can force change. We can't. Politics is a numbers game and if number aren't on your side no chance. Which is why the "boomer" demographic wields so much political power, and always has.
It is so frustrating constantly being told we need to do more, care more but not about that, not like that.

My most sincerer and deepest apologies for not have AS'd your esteemable previous posting prior to responding.

Mayhap, had you done the same for me, you could have found my own posts, going back about a decade now, about the work I do in a food bank and women's crisis centre.

I do a little. I make a little change. We have never been populist, but we carry on and we do make little changes, over time. Some of those changes are the things taken for granted today - various laws around women's safety, Disclosure Orders etc. It's hard grind, but lots of little actions, many people doing a single thing, add up.

And Boomers? Really? Don't be so bloody lazy. Blaming a single demographic for all world ills? Grow up!

@ElephantMeetRoom and @yoyy of course I agree with you that society benefits from an educated work force. How that work force is funded does not affect the benefits to society.

I agree that free uni education was a golden opportunity for poor talented children and the situation is more complex now. I’ve never implied otherwise.

As a child my parents went without food to feed us, we wore jumpers re knitted from old outgrown ones, housing was hard to find with living in rented rooms in other people's homes often children meant you were turned away and if you were the wrong ethnicity no chance, if you were homeless you lost your children no state help as we were still in post war shortage. If you lost your job through Ill health you lost your tied house and your kids, school meals were often the only meal and no food banks, heating in school was a wood burner in the middle of the room (country school late 60's early 70's .....where exactly is this better than nowadays?

Justthisonce12
I like winding up the miserable old bats by reminding them that the one thing that money can’t buy them is their health and their looks ☺️

I take it that you are one of the slimmer ones then? Because when I look at the younger generations it's not necessarily health or particularly nice looks that I am seeing over all. I expect the older people are glad that they invested in pensions rather than fast food and takeaways and aren't trying to distract from that by wearing a fuck ton of make-up.

We were well cared for, but we had very little when I was a child. There was little that was easy in the 50's/60s.

I remember my mum borrowing from a Provi style thing to pay the coalman at the beginning of winter. No government handouts then.

No central heating in our old draughty house - just two coal fires and icy bedroom windows.

Todays young parents didn't invent being poor, contrary to what they think.🙄

Every generation hasbeen through hard times, unless they were very well paid or wealthy to start with.

I'm forever being told how, as the child of Boomers, I must have had a privileged upbringing. But nobody ever believes that this is were I started. One of these pictures is the street I was born on 4 or 5 years later. The street my dad's family still lives on. Oh those rich retired wastrels! Still renting the slum they were born in - now all up to code obviously!

Cold water tap and outside loo, no indoor plumbing until about 1968/70 when the back kitchen got plumbed in. Then there was a single sink inside the house. The council insisted the landlord put a bathroom in in about 1978. He wasn't a bad landlord, just a normal social landlord of the time.

About half of my life has been spent in houses with little or no indoor plumbing, or no central heating etc. It isn't that long ago that this was the norm for working class families. In Liverpool and many other areas, both urban and rural!

I'm not even 60 yet!

www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/nostalgia/gallery/how-liverpools-notorious-slums-were-19185027

Quite. Contrary to popular belief, we didn't all live a luxury life until today's younger generation..,🙄

We had little because a lot of modern stuff didn't exist. New cars and foreign holidays were a rarity.

I suppose the difference is that, in those days, the net didn't exist, so there was nowhere to whinge on about how others had it easier.

We just got on with life lol

I’d completely forgotten about Bessie Braddock. What an amazing woman she was. They don’t make them like her any more. Those pictures are a real eye opener @SamphiretheTervosaurReturneth.

My Nana thought Bessie as a woman was "no better than she ought to be" but as a politician was a force to be reckoned with. She always said that had she not been stuck with a full time job, 7 kids and a husband with shell shock she too would have been out there, agitating. As it was she brought her kids up, daughters included, to be runners for striking dockers, scouse deliveries a speciality!

I look at those pictures now and remember my earliest memories of playing on bomb sites, bringing in and taking out the kitchen bucket and being grateful I was too small to be asked to empty the night bucket! Those pictures are both my happiest childhood memories and the very worst of them! Kirkdale is still pretty much the same in many respects but almost a bloody ghost town now!

Oh fgs. My mother grew up in a malt kiln full of roaches in South Yorkshire. That was in the 1950s.

She would have still reckoned that all "poverty counts" was the product of a small mind. It isn't to do with where you came from, it's what you do.