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!

The regulations absolutely do stop business owners ‘doing a Maxwell’. I thought everyone knew this? And then there’s the pension protection fund that guarantees to pay out virtually all of the pension you would have got if anything does go wrong.

Pensioners are 55% of the “welfare bill” when you only include state pension, pension credit etc paid to pensioners by the DWP. In my analysis I have included welfare such as the state pensions, winter fuel allowance, free prescriptions etc, housing costs paid by the state, social care costs etc - it still comes from our tax money regardless of whether it’s paid from the budget of the DWP or NHS or Local Authorities from an administrative perspective. Therefore, to ensure a proper comparison pulled together the total cost per head of population for welfare and healthcare and represented this in a graph as a percentage of GDP by age cohort.

Exactly this. Those of us who are self employed and barely treading water cannot “save” anything, because every penny we have is already being stretched as much as possible.

Have you tried factoring in the amount of tax those people pay?

cant afford it can barely heat and eat as it is hopefully I will die by then as I wont want to be alive

But the 55% already includes housing and heating and winter fuel allowance, so are you double counting those? It’s all benefits going to pensioners according to Gov UK

Yes. Economic analyses show that as a cohort people in the Boomer generation have a shortfall of over £200k of tax per person over their lifetimes i.e. they are withdrawing from the state £200k more per person in welfare (such as pensions) and services like the NHS etc than they contribute in tax over a whole lifetime, when adjusted for inflation.

In contrast, those of Gen X and the Millenials will be paying £300k more per person over the whole cohort to the state than they receive over their lifetime in services/ welfare. I.e. there is an enormous transfer of wealth going on through extortionately high tax rates to pay money for the pensioners who failed to put sustainable funding systems in place to cover their own costs in retirement, which is impoverishing the generations behind them who are subsidising them despite the retirees having more wealth than any other cohort and a large percentage of them being perfectly capable of funding these costs themselves.

As a result, all other state services are vastly underfunded, hence our crumbling infrastructure and education systems (leading to low productivity and declining growth rates and falling standards of living) alongside sky high tax rates.

A huge redirection of public spending from the old to the young is required and needs to happen imminently if there is to be any prospect of economic growth in the UK and living standards relative to our comparator countries recovering: currently they are dropping like a stone for this precise reason.

The only way to raise growth and living standards is to raise productivity and there is no possibility of this happening while over 50% of public spending (growing annually) is siphoned off to pay for 15% of the population to be kept in comfort that many people working full time and raising children have no prospect of achieving.

You seem to be very confused. The welfare figures from the DWP include state pension, pension credit, winter fuel allowance etc. They do not include social care costs or the NHS costs (the vast majority of which are also spent on the over 65s) as these are not part of the DWP’s budget but distributed by the Department for Health and Local Councils. I have amalgamated all of the data on spending on each cohort by the different Government departments into one graph to reach the totals for the over 65 cohort. Likewise, I have included the education spending on children in the costs for children, and the share of social care and health costs in the totals for children and working-aged adults which are attributable to those cohorts, as well as the amounts distributed by the DWP, so that there can be a meaningful comparison between different age cohorts and what the state spends on each specifically (over and above its provision that relates to all citizens such as justice costs, defence, infrastructure etc).

I’d love to see your source material because those figures don’t seem credible to me.

My source material is the published data produced by the ONS and Her/ now His Majesty’s Government. You are more than welcome to look at this source data yourself because it is publicly available, as it always has been.

Thank you. Although of course I’m apparently inventing the data, according to the posters above who are allergic to data and facts! Quelle surprise…

But silly people like us should just be quiet, and stop bothering them with data and nonsense like that! Their “opinions” are as important as data even if they directly contradict the data because once upon a time they lived in a paper bag in a hole in the road, and their neighbours were jealous, or some other tiresome anecdote.

But you said in your previous quote that you were adding in additional costs like housing, heating, winter fuel etc - these were already included in that 55% figure. I am confused by your figures- they don’t seem remotely correct to me. Pensioner social care is at 0.6% of GDP. Only 40% of the NHS spend goes on pensioners. I know that’s for roughly 20% of the population, but as we get older, we’ll all probably need more healthcare.

No. I said that the DWP figure alone only includes state pension welfare, pension credit, other pensioner welfare such as winter fuel allowance etc. And that my graphs include this AND the costs spent on them by other Government departments and Local Councils such as healthcare costs, social care costs, etc. Obviously I have not “double counted” anything by adding the DWP costs to the costs that other departments spend on the over 65s as each cost is only included in one department’s budget. They don’t record spending in two different budgets otherwise the total Government spending figure would not sum to the total!

Open sipps for children now £100 or £80 to get them open ..opening them is the hardest part. Once they are there it's there.

Indont understand the dislike of an ISA along side pension

I didn’t say you were inventing the data. I said the figures, particularly the assertion that Boomers have a huge deficit while Gen X and millennials have an even bigger surplus, don’t look or feel correct. It’s not unreasonable to ask for your source. Anyone who knows my posting history knows I’m a great fan of data and facts - and link to my sources.

This from the FSFC lists the most recent failed firms.
Failed firms | Firms in default | FSCS https://share.google/uxka217jpLy7nVEcf

how did you find all these data? e.g. housing costs for pensioners specifically? adult social care for pensioners vs all adults who get it? free prescriptions for pensioners specifically vs benefits claimants?

You make a statement that specific cohort, pensioners in this case, take more from state than they contributed over lifetime so this needs urgent review and redistribution. Why do you select this cohort by age? what about working age benefits claimants, a lot of whom never worked at all?

These sorts of thread always turn into bashing a particular generation. It’s dull.

What to are you talking about?
That blasé ignorance is part of the problem
Female life expectancy is 84.

What?? Life expectancy is at an all time high! Or you meant this rhetorically?

Life expectancy is falling but that assertion that few people live into old age is risible. If that were the case half the welfare budget wouldn’t be pensions.

I might not be correct, but I thought the stats were boomers are currently taking out 20% more than they paid in roughly. But that’s not accounting for inheritance tax, which is expected to raise £15 bn a year from 2030 from boomers. Especially with the new changes wrapping pensions into inheritance tax.

Im a millennial, so I’m not being defensive. I just want to check the figures, as they aren’t what I understand them to be. I think I saw the latest stat was more over 70s are paying tax than under 30s. So with more pensioners being dragged into tax, and inheritance tax capturing pensions also, the needle might move on the deficit that the boomer generation have

https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/share-adult-population-paying-income-tax-age-bracket

And according to AI:

Around 1 in 9 taxpaying pensioners (roughly 11%) pay the higher or additional rate of income tax. Due to frozen tax thresholds, the proportion of older adults pulled into higher tax brackets is steadily climbing. 1, 2, 3]

Key Taxpayer Facts for the Over-70 Demographic:

Total Taxpayers: Over 5.4 million Britons aged 70+ pay income tax, a number that outpaces the total taxpayers aged under 30.

Higher Rate Transition: An estimated 1.3 million people aged 60 and over (a substantial portion being over 70) are being dragged into the higher or additional rate bands.

Shift to Higher Taxes: The proportion of taxpaying pensioners paying a 40% tax rate or higher has grown rapidly. 1, 2, 3]

You can review HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) statistics directly on GOV.UK or explore analysis on generational tax shifts via the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 1]

It's good to see some much needed nuance brought into the “them versus taxpayers and the young” debate around pensions and ageing.

We can't do much about the number of people reaching pension age, but we can do much more to influence how many healthy years people have before and during retirement.

Improving health across all age groups should be far more front and centre in the discussion. Delaying or reducing avoidable chronic health conditions could potentially save billions of pounds a year in NHS and social care costs, while also improving quality of life and easing pressure on stretched public services.