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.

@LexMitior that was pretty much my point! Your mother in the generation before mine and her mother the generation before... and on... and on... did you only read part of my posts?

Every generation has its levels pf poverty. Every generation finds its own way of living with it. Some transcend it others do not. A healthy society focuses on supporting those with the least to manage more, not harping on at the generation above for being different!

To be clear, she would not have had much truck with the "we had it hard - you don't have it hard".

She was one of those 3 percent who got to university in the early 1960s. And got paid. Her grand children, no matter how clever, will not have that.

Interesting piece in The Guardian that reckons that when we boomers are dead intergenerational warfare will be replaced by millennials and Gen X resentment of those who have inherited by those who haven’t.

www.theguardian.com/money/2022/dec/03/why-inheritance-is-the-dirty-secret-of-the-middle-classes-harder-to-talk-about-than-sex

To be clear, I haven't said that! I was commenting on those who have said similar!

I am one of 3 in my family to have gone to university. I went, as did the other 2, as adults. We paid for our degrees. None of the next generation have gone, though one is now, again as an adult in his 30s, with family, mortgage etc, applying. Your point?

Ooch! As the scion of Boomers with bugger all to leave that almost made me surprise laugh! I actually hadn't though of that! Neither DH nor I have/had Boomer parents with anything to leave. Inheritance isn't anything we've had to consider. Interesting perspective!

This. We need to get angry about the real ways in which this government waste money - by funnelling it to their mates.

I agree OP. One aspect I think that’s not discussed enough about the pension triple lock is how it links to variations in life expectancy.

Poorer people across the UK live, on average, significantly less long than richer people. Some poor areas have a life expectancy under 70. Some rich areas have one of over 80.

The more generous pensions are the more they are effectively a payment weighted towards the richest people i.e. those with a high life expectancy.

£10 k is below min wage
Accept if you want better services we have to pay more taxes , its that simple

The Guardian article linked by @Blossomtoes is really interesting and quite subtle. We, at 66, have yet to inherit from our parents, although I am currently doing the admin on my late DMIL's estate. The DPILs only had what they earned themselves but they were sensible and fairly frugal as were most people who grew up as war babies. As the widow who survived my FIL by 12 years, and developed Altzheimers in her late 80s, DMIL needed care. Her cash assets were spent during the first eight months in residential care, so her house was sold and the proceeds funded her for the next two years. There's some money in the estate, but it isn't enough to hit IHT, and it will be split between two siblings, one of whom will use the money to buy a home as she has worked in care for most of her life. My mum's estate is also not going to get the Chancellor's gonads thrilled because it's a two up two down in a Midland town. But the funnelling of inheritance will leave our DS in a position to inherit well. We created a business, bought our home, and created a pension fund of which he has been a member since he was three years old. So he will have money to retire in 35 years: it's already there. I am not sure what point I want to make, other than that the time frames for retirement planning are very very long term.

Well of rhats the case then let's all just funds our own lives then shall we, no more benefits for anyone. No childcare, no universal credit no state pension no NHS. Everyone funds their life, that way noone can claim they haven't put enough in, noone can moan that others shouldn't be getting x amount it isn't fair.

Settles the argument once for all. Are you happy to sign up for that? ...I doubt it

That would probably benefit me overall, but no, that isn't what I've suggested at all if you read my posts. I've said I think pensions should be higher than they are now hence triple lock is a sensible mechanism to gradually achieve that over the long term, so they rise to a sensible level by international standards. I've also said explicitly that soceity is about us supporting each other and funding jointly collective goods for society, like education and childcare and pensions and infrstructure, etc. So I'm not really sure why you've directed this comment at me. All I did was call out the self-righteous posters who don't appear to agree with me that we should all fund such things, and believe that meagre contributions that don't even cover their own costs give them a right to be resentful about the very small amount of help younger people get now that nowhere near mitigates the gap between the lifestyles that were achievable for similar jobs/ careers a generation before and now.

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.

Again, you clearly didn't read my posts before responding (even though you specifically posted to say you were going to do so) because the entire point I made was about how people are deliberately sowing division and it's pointless. And how it would be good if each generation showed more solidarity with the other. So I have no idea why you are posting this in response to me.

If all of society benefits from it, as you admit, then it's a social good and it's reasonable for it to be one of the things society funds collectively.

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?

I'm very sorry that your childhood was like that. It is not ok.

What people are concerned about is that much of what you describe is happening again, to many families. 50-60 years later, should we all not be expecting that this is now unacceptable?

So because things were shit that justifies them remaining shit and we should inflict this on more children needlessly when now there are policy choices available - as I set out earlier in the thread - that would largely avoid anybody else having to endure this? Why would you not want that to happen?

• lQuite. Contrary to popular belief, we didn't all live a luxury life until today's younger generation..,🙄 New cars and foreign holidays were a luxury"

Yet more of this crap. Is it meant to be satire? I can't even tell anymore.

You’ll probably benefit in the long run, through inheritance.

Don't blame them; it's mostly Tories who have engineered Europe's lowest pension

You’ll probably benefit through inheritance ?

Hardship benefits nobody. You'd probably define me as lower middle class by origin, my mum was a nurse, as was DMIL, my aunt was a hairdresser. But I was clever and my sister is a grafter. So we were lucky, and we made our own luck too. We went overseas to work and came home with the money for a deposit on a house. Then we took the risk of self employment. We saved for the future; and for our kid's futures, and we were proud when they went to university. What they make of their legacy is over to them.

Because they benefit from allowing this to happen. Capitalism relies on a minimum of 5% unemployment and the squeezed middle. Without the poor there can be no rich.

When we had slums we had upper middle class landowners who shot starved children for stealing wild rabbits from their land. People were hanged for stealing bread. Weve come a long way in relative terms but the concept is the same.

Because they benefit from allowing this to happen. Capitalism relies on a minimum of 5% unemployment and the squeezed middle. Without the poor there can be no rich.
When we had slums we had upper middle class landowners who shot starved children for stealing wild rabbits from their land. People were hanged for stealing bread. Weve come a long way in relative terms but the concept is the same.

There are many models around Europe especially that have been proved over many years to work that do not involve this kind of suffering.

Research for the Institute for Fiscal Studiess* thinktank last year showed that for children born in the 60s, a quarter of the difference in living standards between rich and poor was explained solely by inherited capital. For 80s children, a third of it is

Interesting article. But 1/4 to 1/3 doesn't seem like a huge societal shift, compared to all of the other things happening?

A really interesting article. Now I'm waiting for a new wave of bile to be directed at any MNer who gives their child a leg-up (only boomers need apply) out of their ill-gotten gains.

But 1/4 to 1/3 doesn't seem like a huge societal shift, compared to all of the other things happening?

Boomers haven’t started dying in any numbers yet, just watch the downward avalanche of all that obscene wealth over the next 20 or so years.

Now I'm waiting for a new wave of bile to be directed at any MNer who gives their child a leg-up (only boomers need apply) out of their ill-gotten gains.

My son got a substantial proportion of my inheritance, I’ve only got to live another 2.5 years for it to avoid IHT. We can’t win with this one - give it away and we’re damned, keep it and we’re also damned.

With caree costs plus 40% inheritance tax, I dubt the effect will be as substantial as you think it will.