45% of working age people not saving toward a pension at all

[FernFaery]

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/may/19/britons-not-saving-enough-retire-pensions-commission

Another looming crisis!

Also be aware that there are segments of society where people tend to not to focus on pensions because they are from communities that focus on caring for and financially supporting older relatives within the family. My neighbour never bothered saving for a pension (he was a taxi driver). He lives in a multi generational home with his son & grandchildren and whereas he used to be the one paying the bills, now his son & daughter in law do. His son is ok financially with this because he's never had to buy another house.

He is a freelancer so won't get employer contributions, but will receive more in pay than his salaried counterparts, out of which he needs to save in a personal pension pot. Anyone can do this - stuff like Hargreaves landown and the like. He can claim tax relief via his tax return.

There's truth in this but we also have a crisis with too many working age people not working and living off benefits. Often classified as "disabled" by modern standards but would not have been eligible 20 years ago.

Okay - replace with Jim Radcliffe and Ineos or James Dyson and Dyson.

Taylor Swift can’t sell her masters to anyone BUT a billionaire, so she couldn’t sell them to pay tax.

Let’s say Dyson does want to sell some shares - would you want to buy shares that you can’t sell on as they’re not listed, and that might never pay you any dividends because the company is focussed on reinvestment not returning funds to shareholders? They’d be as useful as an antique vase (less useful actually because you can’t put flowers in them). So who’s going to buy them to allow Dyson to pay his tax?

Except the examples you've given are proving "don't want" rather than can't. 2.5k on a holiday is over £200 a month. That plus employer contribution would be an excellent pension, a quick calculation suggests between £1m - £5m depending on growth.

And your pay wouldn't even be £200 less pcm because it would be taken before tax.

And yes, holidays are a luxury, not an essential. Or at least something to cut back on, e.g. abroad every 2/3 years rather than every year. £300 per child for Christmas is insane! I bet most of it ends up in the bin.

If people aren’t saving additional toward a pension so what?

If you are then other households just having state pension in retirement is up to them surely?

The Government can put in incentives and laws for employers to offer pension schemes which they have done. They can raise awareness and journalists can break down numbers and explain the benefits.

After that it’s up to individuals to make their own financial choices.

Again an over simplification of the available research. I suspect many researchers would find it closer to an opinion piece than a credible peer reviewed piece of work.

It's this lack of nuance and black-and-white thinking that gets in the way of real solutions.

There is a lot of peer-reviewed research suggesting that most people support helping those who genuinely need it, while also believing that fairness, reciprocity and personal responsibility matter. These do not have to be in conflict. Trust in the system is important because people are generally more willing to support welfare when they believe it is fair, reciprocal and difficult to exploit. Their systems are not perfect, but higher levels of trust, reciprocity and personal responsibility are frequently mentioned when discussing some of the strengths of the Nordic welfare systems.

The debate becomes unproductive when any concern about incentives or fairness is dismissed as a lack of compassion or greed or selfishness, whilst any discussion of poverty, hardship or struggle or is treated as excusing everything. A real and sustainable solutions would usually require acknowledging both circumstance and individual responsibility at the same time.

Yes - this is the reality.

and of course people will reply citing examples of severely disabled, non-verbal, very ill young people who are bed bound….. but the reality is that many young people currently receiving benefits are capable of working. They’re trapped in a system which doesn’t incentivise them to work … after a year or so of believing they can’t work and being paid benefits, they’re going to have less and less self belief that they can actually change things.

But the welfare state steps in, which means everyone else picks up the tab. Most people are broadly fine with that for those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves.

It is an unreasonable expectation for others to carry the burden for those who perhaps could have contributed more or planned better, but did not. Especially when much of that will fall on younger tax payers.

I’d love to see the stats on that.

For example, how many billionaires started out as an average Joe, raised by a working class or lower middle class family on an average wage, had some kind of talent or brilliance and have become a billionaire entirely due to their income from that. No investments, no stock market involvement, no property acquisition, they simply took the cash and put it in a savings account, maybe putting some money into a pension, absolutely no residual income. I’d wager that number is zero. As soon as anyone gets any kind of meaningful money, they have a financial advisor. They are told they need to make their money work for them, protect it from Governments, minimise their tax spend using loopholes.

I’m all for people making money from their skills, but where their tax spend is minimised, despite the fact they are benefitting from the whole infrastructure that those taxes pay for, and they make money from stock market speculation which is the biggest reason for the wealth gap as assets have been bought by the wealthy, taking them out of the reach of most of society therefore denying them the ability to benefit from any financial benefit.

Asking billionaires to pay more tax is no more theft than the government raising taxes on businesses, raising income tax, or cutting benefits.

Exactly. Attitudes like that - thinking pension saving is optional - are exactly why auto-enrolment needs to be mandatory with no opt out. Otherwise there are people who will prioritise luxuries over pension saving which is essential, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill.

There will always be a small proportion of people too disabled to work and the state pension should be a safety net for that situation. For everyone who can work pension saving should not be a choice. £150bn and rising per year is going on state pensions and it’s simply not affordable when we’re paying £100bn in debt interest and can’t afford to fund schools and healthcare etc properly. People need to accept being responsible for their own retirement funds.

The PP’s comment to which you responded also shows many people have no grasp of basic maths and compounding, another reason why the opt-out needs to be removed. Pension saving needs to be treated like a tax, in effect, but with everyone saving for their own so that changes in demographics don’t bankrupt the country. Anybody who understands even very basic maths can see that it is a mathematical certainty that the current system is not sustainable, especially the triple lock, but ultimately the UK public will have to accept the state pension beings means-tested.

The country is broke and we can’t afford to continue this largesse to pensioners, far in excess of the tax they have contributed. Over 25% of those in receipt of state pensions are millionaires and a further 25% have incomes higher than the national average full time salary (£39k). For us to be handing out welfare to people in this situation is ridiculous when they have minimal costs and means testing it at this level would cause no poverty to anybody. To be demanding state welfare you have no need of while taxes are sky high and public services is crumbling is absurdly entitled and anti-social and frankly should be ignored. Nearly 70% if pensioners have no housing costs and those that do largely have this paid via benefits on top of the state pensions welfare!

It’s not acceptable for living standards for those of working age, infrastructure, education, healthcare and defence to crumble and a large proportion of children to be living in poverty just because people will kick up a fuss if they don’t get state handouts they don’t require when they are the richest cohort in society by far and over half of them have absolutely no need for state welfare to have a comfortable standard of living, particularly when this situation was foreseen and entirely predictable and they chose not to demand politicians rectified it decades ago when they should have and voted for tax cuts for themselves instead.

Australia anticipated the demographic problem and implemented sensible system decades ago. We should have done the same. We need to do this now; better late than never.

The “so what” is that our children will be crippled with higher taxes to fund their irresponsibility.

This is often trotted out but the percentage of GDP spent on benefits for people of working age has been remarkably static since the 1970s. The distribution changes as politicians shunt people around between different definitions for political purposes but the overall percentage cost has moved very little, just normal fluctuations with economic cycles.

The increases in the welfare bill are almost entirely down to unfunded state pensions for the elderly for far longer than it was designed to cover and for which they paid, as a cohort, nowhere near enough tax, and their social care costs that are funded by the state.

But the state pension isn’t going to be removed or means tested. It’s just not.

I know there are some crazy people who think the state pension should be the same as NMW at 40 hours a week (so £2k a month) this clearly isn’t going to happen.

GenX are a much smaller population. It’s tax payers now supporting a large retirement generation not our children.

If you as an individual don’t want to save for retirement then the state pension is it, you know the amount approx. You know it’s low. That’s up to you.

I know some are disabled and can’t work, again yes? You are likely to have been funded and housed for a long time. Which is fine and you will also get state pension.

We want an early retirement with enough income to have fun, we are exploiting every tax incentive to do so, all legally, and that’s all anyone can do.

Claim every benefit you are entitled to, exploit every tax incentive you can. That’s the system.

If the rules change then we adapt.

To note, to save this amount over a working life, the monthly 3% deduction from salary (before tax) is £66.09, resulting in a £47.58 reduction in net pay (in the basic rate tax band + NI). So it will cost those on minimum wage with PAYE jobs just £47.58 per month over their working life to generate a pension fund with employer contributions and tax relief added to this, which should enable them to purchase an annuity that is index-linked (rises with inflation each year) providing them with £25k plus per year in retirement.

Yet we have posters saying that £2.5k per annum that they splash on holidays per year “wouldn’t make a difference”! And deciding instead to save nothing at all and expect the taxpayer to pick up the tab when they are elderly. This is the problem and it’s sheer entitlement.

Yes, there are a few people who are very disabled and can’t work at all/ cannot work full time (not choose not to do so) who genuinely can’t afford to save anything but the number who are in that position over their entire adult life is a tiny proportion of the population, far below the proportion who simply aren’t bothering to save because they’d rather spend the money now than even set a small amount aside. For the former group taxpayers should provide a pension income (which could be far more generous than currently due to the very small number of them compared to those claiming it now). For the latter group, they should not receive anything at all and they are the reason that pension saving must be mandated and deducted from their salaries without any opt-out.

It's about time people planned for their retirement. People can afford Sky, WiFi, latest phones, holidays abroad, new cars ... all if which should come behind pension contributions.

It is going to have to be means-tested, whether the UK public likes it or not. If you run the maths there is no other option. It’s a matter of when, not if.

As for your other tiresome comments, try actually reading my posts. Nothing I’ve proposed would leave anybody in poverty and I’ve explicitly emphasised several times that there are people who are so disabled they can never work or genuinely cannot earn enough to save the meagre amount per month required to build any retirement fund, for whom a state pensions safety net will always - I’m sure - remain in place, rightly. The problem is the large number of irresponsible people who are working and absolutely could save a small amount per month and generate a sufficient fund over their lifetime to support themselves in retirement but don’t bother to do so and think it’s ok to make everyone else pick up the tab for this and plead poverty later in life when they chose not to bother to save. These people are selfish and entitled and I don’t think the state should give them any help whatsoever.

You seem to be agreeing with what I’ve said at first but then talk about “exploiting loopholes”. I’m not sure what you mean by this. The tax relief (actually mainly just deferred tax, the mirror image of the ISA arrangement) on pensions is a deliberate incentive to save, not a “loophole” which implies some kind of accidental feature of the tax system that enables tax avoidance. Using legitimate tax breaks designed for that specific purpose to incentivise positive behaviours (as tax should - sadly not many areas of our tax code do so and those that do are steadily being eroded) is not “exploiting” anything. It’s simply acting rationally in precisely the manner in which those designing the system were hoping people would respond.

As for your advice to claim welfare that is not required, that is not morally right although it may be legal. Obviously the welfare system has to have different design parameters to the tax system because it is meant to be a safety net, therefore if designed well it will have to set its limits more generously than the minimum requirement/ criteria for qualification in order to avoid fringe cases where people fall through the cracks and it therefore fails to meet its purpose. The main reason it is being eroded over recent decades and has become dysfunctional (aside from poor design such as providing state pension welfare without means testing which wastes £80bn per year currently, and levying tax on an individual basis which is dysfunctional anyway then providing much of welfare on a household basis, which obviously and inevitably has the effect of creating economic distortions and perverse incentives and harming growth and productivity) is precisely because of the type of attitude you express: “claim everything you’re entitled to”. Disrespect of what is meant to be a safety net and trying to milk all you can out of a system when you have no need of it, once this becomes a prevalent attitude, means that there is insufficient funding for those who do require it and that criteria have to be tightened, often hitting the wrong people (those it was intended to help, who actually need it) and the system starts to collapse.

For a society and economic system to operate properly there has to be some level of social responsibility not just a “grab whatever you can and screw everyone else” attitude and your comment exemplifies why this isn’t working anymore in the UK.

This is why it won’t be means tested - because there would be uproar that those who are responsible end up with less after probably putting in more.

There is a stronger argument to increase income tax then the feckless will have money taken from them before they can spend it on tattoos.

No Government can remove the triple lock - means testing is way beyond that.

No, there isn’t. It will be means tested because mathematically there is no other option.

Eventually the UK public are going to have to start behaving like adults and face economic reality.

Our spineless politicians have made the situation far worse than it needed to be by playing hot potato and ignoring this glaringly obvious reality for so long because they know the electorate don’t want to hear it, but eventually the piper has to be paid I’m afraid and it’s inevitable whether people like it or not.

It’s just a question of when it happens. Knowing our incompetent system with no long-term planning and an economically illiterate and supremely entitled electorate, it won’t happen until the point of complete collapse and therefore the outcomes will be far worse than if it was phased in with a long period of warning. But it will happen regardless because the maths simply doesn’t provide any other possible outcome.

The number of net lifetime contributors is shrinking and the gap between them and net lifetime recipients is broadening. The socio-economic spectrum is bifurcating and it's increasingly hard to move from one group to the other.

I thought Labour might have had a go at not removing the triple lock but making it an average of the three values as they had such a large majority and if they had communicated it well, jumped quick by the end of their term it would be an accepted policy.

But they didn’t.

No one is going to means test pensions. They might put the age up to 70, and make it harder to claim disability.

They could increase contributions from 35 to 40 or 45 years for full state pension.

Yes, the children that do work and aren't on Benefits themselves due to some vague, elusive diagnosis of anxiety, no doubt.

And a political party will make cuts in welfare payments a manifesto pledge. And they will get in power if this is what this democratic country prefers.

Its so patronising to say the reason some people literally cannot afford to save for their pension is due to lack of education.

I am educated. I'm not a fucking magician. I cannot save what is not there. After all essential bills THERE IS NOTHING LEFT.

Its honestly making my blood boil how some of you cannot grasp that some people are living paycheck to paycheck with not a penny left over and only covering the basics.

I work a professional job at a decent salary, just above the threshold of financial help, and just cover my essentials and no more. It doesnt matter how much I do or dont understand compound interest (I do) - the cost of living eats my entire wage so I have nothing left to save.

Pretty hard not to spend 100% of your money when your bills are 100% of your wage.