Who is going to pay for your state pension/ care in old age?

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Apparently birth rates are falling, and this is putting future pensions (and I would imagine general tax income) in jeopardy as the population will proportionally age.

What's the solution? Should we just write off our paid for "right" to a state pension and state support for care in older age?

Does this change your view on public investment in supporting people to have children if you otherwise thought this was a personal choice and you should support/ pay for your own children?

AIBU to think that NI contributions for "pension" is essentially government mandated mis-selling and state pension will go out the window in the next few decades?

Apparently birth rates are falling, and this is putting future pensions (and I would imagine general tax income) in jeopardy as the population will proportionally age.

No the flat lining birth rate will not cause this. Immigration of young workers in and emigration of pensioners out more than offsets the birth rate that is just below replacement level.

In addition, the population does porportionally age because we have an unusually high number of elderly now because the baby boomer generation is extremely large. The next generation after them to retire is unusually small.

What's the solution? Should we just write off our paid for "right" to a state pension and state support for care in older age?

No solution is needed other than to

• ease freedom of movement between the UK and EU.
• reverse the NI cuts

It will be $600, not pounds

Maybe it should be linked to having children / number of children. I have three kids, at significant cost to myself, so I've done my bit to contribute to the future generation of workers. It makes me feels resentful that if the state pension is unaffordable then we're all equally affected.

If you've not had children you've had more opportunities to work and build a nest egg for the future.

If the burden of having children was better recognised in the tax / pension system, maybe people would have more.

Is this a joke? You think people who haven’t had children should be punished by not getting the state pension?

Many people didn’t have children because they couldn’t, or they couldn’t afford to, rather than because they didn’t want to. And if the reason is because they didn’t want to, so what? They have been working and paying taxes to educate and look after YOUR children. They have saved the state money by not claiming child benefit, maternity care, and NHS care for children. And that’s without factoring in the parents who get a lot of Universal Credit due to children (with the cap now being lifted too).

I am all for parents getting support as having children is expensive. I support reforms to help the burden with childcare costs, and recognise we need people to have children to continue society and the social contract. But punishing those who haven’t had children is wrong and quite frankly, cruel.

You haven’t ’done your bit’, what is this, The Handmaid’s Tale? I’m sure you had your children because YOU wanted them, not for the good of society. Do you want a medal or something

It’s always a race to the bottom on here.

@givemesteel Maybe it should be linked to having children / number of children. I have three kids, at significant cost to myself, so I've done my bit to contribute to the future generation of workers.

Do you think your children cost the taxpayers nothing? I mean, antenatal care, child benefit, school meals, education, childhood vaccines, free health care etc etc. it cost the tax payer more for you to have kids than it actually costs you! And you had 3!

No, just realistic.

No, race to the bottom.

Do you think people should be penalised for being unable to have children? And should people be encouraged to have children as an insurance policy for the future?

Do you think people who have not had children are not contributing towards other people’s children through the taxes they pay?

I have one child. He has complex needs and it's uncertain if he'll be able to work in the future.

He costs the taxpayers a lot of money to care for.

Linking it to having children wouldn't be as simple as you might think and is unfair to those who can't or don't have children yet contribute to taxes which covers NHS care during pregnancies, education etc.

It’s not a privilege to retire at 60, especially if you’ve worked in physically or mentally demanding jobs eg most trades, social worker, teacher etc. what is a privilege is to not work or work very little taking benefits from the hard working people above!

But no on MN we’re supposed to be proud to work and ‘contribute’, fund everything for ourselves (even if it makes us worse off) so that people can get what they’re ‘entitled’ to from cradle to grave. We’re then told that bad luck you won’t get a state pension and you’ll have to keep working to pay for the above! Or if you decide not to have children you’re bad bad bad and will pay more despite a large number of these future taxpayers being nothing if the sort! You couldn’t make it up!

See this is the problem - we’re treating future generations as a source of labour for our current economic gain instead of thinking about what we will create for them. This is completely backwards.

The most common topic of conversation amongst my clients, friends, family, etc., amongst us 60+ year olds is GP and hospital appointments, mostly for pretty serious illnesses/diseases!

Christ! That's not typical conversation between 60+ me and my 80+ relatives!

I like how Singapore do pensions. Mandatory pensions savings.

In terms of pensions, that has always been the case. Today's pensioners paid fir their parents and grandparents' pensions.
I don't know why today's workers think they are being uniquely shafted by doing something that has happened since pensions were introduced.

Because the gold posts are being moved and then reaping the rewards is being removed by stealth. They are actually unlikely to be rewarded in the same way. That’s why they’ve got the hump.

But pensions are ever-evolving. When i started work, retirement age for women was 60. I will retire at 67.
No. It's just thecrhetoric that no generation has ever struggled and suffered like today's young families and everything prior to their suffering was a bed if roses.
All nonsense.

How are the goal posts being moved? They were last moved in 2010 in a process so unfair that any future state pension changes have to give a minimum of ten years notice. What “rewards” are being removed? Again, apart from means testing WFA with a extremely generous threshold, what’s changed?

What's changed is people's attitude to society. It's all me, me, me now.
As is evidenced by pps having a problem with funding their parents' pensions.
We are utterly child centric now, and older generations ars nithing but a nuisance.
Sad.

The example was an obvious one about making changes to worker's conditions.
If everyone was as blinkered, passive and self centered as yourself no progress would ever have been made in the working world and we wouldn't even have a retirement to be discussing.

If you really don't mind working forever, that's fantastic. For you.
Maybe go outside and look around a little bit at the world and and you'll see that it's a big old unequal place and different perspectives to yours are just that.
Different perspectives.
Different opportunities.Different economic situations and hardships. Different access to health care etc.

Dismissing all of this as " whining" is beyond ridiculous.

It’s our own fault as a generation. We brought them up.

Making changes to some workers' conditions in order to safeguard future workers. That's what we are talking about here. The public debt we would need to accrue to allow you to retire at 60 will have to be repaid by the next generation. What about their rights not to be saddled with your debt? Your approach is the epitomy of selfish and it absolutely is whining. You know that future generations will have it worse than you and you simply don't care. You want to compound that inequality by retiring at 60 when it's likely that lots of young people will retire much later with much worse pensions.

Just own it. You are selfish and you will stamp your feet until you get what you think you are owed despite probably not contributing enough in the first place to actually fund the pension you want.

Because today’s pensioners were paying for a much smaller amount of pensioners than workers are today. They also didn’t fund the triple lock (introduced 2010) for pensioners when they were working. The pensions when they were working were paltry.

So today’s pensioners want triple lock pensions and winter fuel allowance etc, but when they were working they wanted to pay low taxes to pay for their parents and grandparents pensions.

People born after 1978 will also have to wait until 68 or older to get state pension (the age will probably rise again).

The people on here who think that those without children should not get a pension because they haven't 'done their bit' for society will presumably not ever be using any services that might be staffed by those without children.

So for example, my elderly neighbour has no children and for the last 20 years or so she has been tirelessly volunteering with our local hospice and has also raised a lot of money for it too.

The last time that the pensions were changed was 2020
Prior to that I personally had taken out a mortgage that I had fully intended to withdraw 25% of my pension at the age of 55 to clear.
I’m sure like many people I might have reconsider the numbers had I known I was going to be on the hook for it for another couple of years.
My family typically dies quite early and I’ve got no reason to believe I’ll buck the trend so from 57 onwards every day will be a bonus
Rather than the Mortgage free utopia, I was looking forward to