It’s very simple. As I’ve said multiple times here and on other threads we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Australia used to have a pension system modelled on ours. Like us, they realised several decades ago that this ponzi scheme would be completely unsustainable due to demographic changes. Unlike us, they reformed it.
They now have a means-tested system tapering the payment away for those who do not require it. Simultaneously, they mandated and gradually increased the levels of private pension savings (which was affordable for both employees and employers because they didn’t have to pay such high taxes to fund the state pension ponzi scheme anymore). The public there generally accepts that this is a good, robust and fair system and it works.
What we need to do is remove the opt-out from auto-enrolment so make pension saving for individuals mandatory (with a similar mandatory system for the self-employed unless they can demonstrate sufficient assets to self-fund their retirement already). This protects against future demographic changes (given the falling birthrate, this is essential: the problem with the ponzi scheme is not going to go away). Then mandatory contribution levels need to be raised, gradually, to ensure that the majority of people have sufficient funding for themselves.
Obviously it would have been far better if the Boomers who are now retired had implemented this decades ago when the problem was well-known and foreseen in advance, but they didn’t do so. They voted for tax cuts for themselves instead. So now the change will have to happen with a far less gradual pace but that’s entirely of their own making, frankly, and any gripes about that should be directed to the politicians of their own generation who failed to act at the appropriate time several decades ago.
This isn’t rocket science. Just like with healthcare, education, taxation, other parts of the welfare system, childcare provision, we know which systems work and which do not because there is copious evidence from decades and decades of them being implemented in other countries. We’re not feeling our way in the dark here, we have the evidence.
The problem is politicians in the UK refusing to implement evidence-based policy and instead wrecking the economy and deliberately making everyone poorer and poorer because they don’t have the backbone to articulate to the electorate the changes that need to be made. Primarily because, as we can see on this thread, a large proportion of the electorate don’t want to hear it and would rather stick their fingers in their ears and shout “Give me my cake! Otherwise it’s not faaaaaaaiiiiiirrrrr!”.
People in the UK seem to believe that things can’t get worse. They very much can. A lot worse. Over history the fortunes and prosperity of different countries have risen and fallen many times and there is no innate right for people here to have a higher standard of living than those in China, India, African countries, Afghanistan… we have this currently because of historic events. Other countries have Governments working extremely hard to ensure that they are the ones with higher living standards in the future. If we do not soon get a Government determined to and capable of doing the same then our living standards will drop like a stone in a pond and the UK public really needs to understand this fact before it is too late.
But it seems many pensioners don’t care and their view is “I’ll be dead by then and it won’t affect me so it doesn’t matter”. A disturbingly large proportion of them seem to have far less care for their children and grandchildren than any generation before or afterwards, a weird a supremely self-centred view on the world which has caused so much damage to our society and will continue to do so as long as their stranglehold on politics remains in place. Somebody needs to stand up to them finally and tell them enough is enough, but we have no politicians with the backbone to do so.