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!

Hard to see how means testing would work, with the majority of pensions being defined contributions you'd probably get people taking the lump sum 10 years before state pension age, retiring earlier to run down the amount below any threshold for means testing. Of course they could say it's deprivation of assets but that would be hard to say since you'd just be living in the income -could easily get through 500k in 10 years with an average lifestyle. The above is more or less my plan anyway though I will have a modest dB pension to top up state pension from 67.

Thanks for the further stats @BIossomtoes

I forgot to @DrRylandGraceas it was in response to her

You’re welcome ☺️

What would have been if we had set up a sovereign wealth fund like Norway and invested the revenue from North Sea oil instead of tax cuts for the rich. Maybe a pension fund as well to invest for the future generations rather than sell off the family silver, while destroying our industries. How great would that be?

While I agree that would have been more sensible, you have to recognise that the population of Norway is less than 10% of the UK. The population is much more centralised on big cities, where it is easier to deliver services. Much of Norway is close to uninhabitable but every sheltered pock in the UK landscape is farmed and cultivated, until you are into the Highlands.

I live on the edge of Dartmoor. The soil is thin and rocky, so it's unsuitable for cereal crops. It's highish altitude and cold and wet all winter, so cattle don't thrive, except for Highland breeds like Belted Galloways. You end up with sheep which are perfectly adapted to the environment. But to be profitable, you need to make money on the meat (delicious) and/or the wool (which is currently too expensive to shear and not in demand anyway, until we go back to buying woollen carpets).

I know everyone has forgotten that England's wealth was originally founded on sheep farming. The Cotswolds are a beautiful manmade landscape and places like Cirencester and Burford are property magnets few of us can afford to live in, because of sheep. England exported wool and woollen goods to Europe for 1000 years.

I delineated the data by age cohort of those over retirement age or not because we are discussing pensions so spending per head by age is highly relevant, particularly when multiple posters (as usual) have falsely tried to claim that there has been a significant increase in the cost of welfare to those of working age which is proved to be false by the data.

I’m an economist so I am used to extracting data from the published sources and analysing it and have tried to present it clearly here in graphs to demonstrate the basic factual matters which many posters seem unable to grasp, which is a large part of the reason the UK is in the mess it is in currently: a far too high proportion of the electorate refuses to accept economic reality as can be seen by these posts.

When it is presented to them they start to deny that the data is valid even though it’s from publicly published verified sources like the national accounts, departmental budgets and analyses and the ONS. Data is met with whataboutery and denial of its validity rather than any actual response to the facts presented, every single time one tries to inject any facts or daya into the discussion. People would rather argue about their prejudices than discuss actual facts, every single time.

I have no political affiliation and am politically homeless in the UK because there isn’t a single party prepared to speak the truth and make evidence-based policy. I call out comments from all sides of the political spectrum when they are factually wrong.

Too many people seem determined to condemn the future generations of UK population to the inevitable poverty that will follow the ongoing economic decline which has resulted from the status quo and been exacerbated by extremely unwise choices over the last decade in particular and will continue to accelerate as long as this approach continues.

It’s not yet too late to change it but it will require grabby and entitled people, in particular those in the older cohorts, to accept reality and prioritise the future of their children and grandchildren and have a little humbleness regarding the needlessly dire circumstances that younger generations are already enduring as a result of the actions of those who are now retired. It will also require some social responsibility from everyone and a fairer distribution of the tax burden which is currently disproportionately placed on higher earning (but not wealthy) PAYE earners which is not sustainable. You cannot have European models of state services and welfare when the majority of the electorate do not pay anything close to their own costs, it simply cannot happen in a country without huge natural resources/ exports which we do not have (and obviously have far less of since Brexit self-sabotage, meaning we are now importing immense amounts of inflation as was predicted).

I won’t hold my breath.

If people refuse to change their entitled behaviour - particularly the older cohorts who have already taken far more from the country than they will ever contribute to it yet demand more and more - then they should at least have the decency to own the consequences honestly rather than continuously trying to blame everyone else, when the data categorically refutes their spurious claims that young people are “lazy” or “workshy” and it is in fact their own generation that screwed our economy and continues to do so. Accusing people of lying whenever they point out the glaringly obvious proven fallacies is ridiculous and just shows how little that generation care about actually improving anything in the UK.

The truth doesn’t care about your theories or ideologies. It lies in wait for all time.

Given you have to be significantly into the higher rate tax band to even be covering your own costs on average (i.e. at the average spend per person across the whole of UK residents) and the fact that the data I presented earlier demonstrates that the spend per head is far, far higher on over 65s than younger cohorts, even those paying higher rate tax are unlikely to be covering their costs to the state per year. And you think the fact that one in NINE of them pays this is somehow a good thing? It’s almost comical that this is your attempt to claim that somehow they’re covering their costs when every credible economic study on the subject demonstrates that they categorically have not and will not do so over their lifetimes, leaving a shortfall as a cohort of approximately £200k per person in real terms between their lifetime tax payments and the state services and welfare they receive.

I suppose you thought this sounded impressive. It isn’t. It actually demonstrates my point, and your complete lack of an adequate grasp of economics or maths, so thank you for your post.

How many people pay tax is an irrelevant statistic. They could be paying £1 per month, or £50, or £200, fairly irrelevant amounts which come nowhere close to even covering their own costs even if they never use healthcare or welfare or state pensions and only receive the emergency services and defence and infrastructure and basic education provided for all.

The only relevant measure is lifetime tax payments adjusted for inflation compared against state services and welfare received, and what the shortfall/ excess in tax payment is when the two are compared.

Classic. The data doesn’t “look or feel correct”, allegedly. Based on what, other than your own prejudices?

I’m so sorry that you disagree with the ONS, IFS, national accounts, published departmental budgets and spending analyses etc.

Please do feel free to post your own analysis of the publicly published data which refutes mine because you don’t like how the actual data “feels”. 🙄

Oh also, you’ll find that the reason lots of people of retirement age are paying income tax is because their state welfare alone takes them to the brink of the tax free allowance! So what you’re actually saying is we’re giving a lot of people with independent incomes who don’t need welfare lots of welfare that we can’t afford, then they’re annoyed that they have to pay some tax on it! 🙄🤣 Hilarious.

As for “growing numbers of them have to pay tax or pay tax at higher rates”, that is by definition true of the entire population on average over recent years because of fiscal drag and tax thresholds being frozen. Why do you think this is noteworthy in respect of pensioners when they are also exempted from NI, and are the richest cohort in society with those actually paying taxes at any significant level being those who have large amounts of assets and low living costs compared to people of working age? It literally could not be untrue that more of them now pay tax or fall into higher tax band brackets given the frozen tax thresholds unless pensioners’ incomes were being reduced, when as well all know they have actually been increased far above average salary rises or inflation for years now due to the triple lock nonsense. What are you trying to say, that working aged people should pay at the now real-terms lower tax thresholds but pensioners shouldn’t?!

The most hilarious thing of all is when one encounters the mathematical illiterates who can’t even grasp that it is literally impossible for the triple lock to continue in perpetuity because if it did it is a mathematical certainty that state pension welfare payments would eventually exceed the entire GDP of the UK.

All your posts here have done is demonstrate your total incomprehension of even the most basic maths that my primary school children understand and what is even more baffling is that one poster actually thanked you for your comments as though they were informative! I really do despair that we are spending money to provide compulsory education to the whole population and this is the level of mathematical and economic understanding and that some people are actually impressed by idiotic comments like this.

You haven’t posted your workings. I’m perfectly willing to accept what you say if you evidence it. You’ve picked the wrong person to belittle here. It has absolutely nothing to do with prejudice, by the way.

My workings? Jesus Christ I’m not your personal assistant. I’ve posted plenty of data and graphs and stated the sources which are the ONS, national accounts and departmental budgets and breakdowns of spending, as stated repeatedly. If you want to dispute the data from these published sources and multiple publicly available and peer reviewed economic studies then perhaps you should post some actual data of your own from whatever sources you apparently deem to be more reliable than the above and which allegedly refute all of this data I’ve used which is in the public domain, rather than expecting anybody to care that you “feel the data looks wrong to you”. 🤦🏻‍♀️😆

No evidence. Fine. You’ve posted nothing to show how you’ve reached your far fetched conclusions. Go ahead and post some more sneering insults. I won’t be here to read them. It’s bed time.

Younger generations do face genuine economic pressures, but turning millions of ordinary elderly people into villains is neither serious economics nor constructive policymaking. Most pensioners are not policymakers or economists. They simply worked, paid taxes, bought homes within the system that existed at the time and planned for retirement as society encouraged them to do.

There is also a bit of irony in someone calling themselves an economist while criticising stereotypes about younger people, but then lumping millions of pensioners together as though they are all the same and personally responsible for the country’s problems.

A good economist should be able to separate complex structural issues like policy, housing, demographics, incentives and government decisions from simple blame narratives. They should also be able to offer a more nuanced summary of our current situation, rather than selectively framing the issue in a way that becomes little more than a version of “all young people are lazy” but aimed at older people instead.

If only the UKs problems were that simple or binary. No such luck! They are structural: decades of underbuilding, planning constraints, regional inequality, low productivity growth, monetary policy, financial deregulation and poor government policy choices across multiple administrations. The people whose decisions helped lead us to low growth, chronic housing shortages, huge student debt burdens, pressure on the NHS and the selling off of national assets were policymakers, governments, economists, institutions and financial actors over many decades, not pensioners.

You can argue for reform and intergenerational fairness without portraying older people as “grabby and entitled.” That kind of language stokes resentment between generations instead of focusing on how we can pressure governments to come up with practical solutions that would actually improve housing, productivity, long-term living standards and deliver growth.

I haven’t said elderly people are villains. I’ve pointed out structural economic issues that need to be fixed in terms of redirecting a significant amount of unnecessary spending on the proportion of the elderly cohort who have no need of welfare that the country can’t afford so means-testing their welfare to save £80bn per year and this can instead be spent on the areas of public spending that are vastly underfunded currently and in which it is necessary to spend a lot more in order to generate increased productivity and therefore growth and rising living standards: education, infrastructure and a proper industrial strategy. If you think that’s facile then I’m not sure what to say to you. At the same time we need to rebalance the tax system so that the unstable inverse pyramid is addressed, remove the cliff-edges that are creating perverse incentives, and have an honest discussion as a nation about whether we want higher taxes on low and median earners (given our higher earners pay some of the highest tax rates in the entire world already) or a smaller state: we can’t have both.

It is undeniable that a huge block to having any sensible discussion about the economy is that a large proportion of the older generation refuse to accept economic facts and nothing will change until either they stop this destructive behaviour or there is a political party prepared to put forward the sensible arguments and hope that the rest of the population overrules their block voting. I certainly haven’t implied that they are the only problem; as this thread and many others like it demonstrate there are also a large proportion of people of working age sucked in by the same kind of victim-blaming narratives or spurious distractions with irrelevancies that are rounding errors in the UK budget, people who have no grasp of basic maths, and people who fail to take any personal responsibility such as those who could save for pensions but spend all their money now instead and expect our children and grandchildren to pick up the tab for their irresponsibility. I’ve made comments about all of these things, not just the problem of the entitled over 65s who are making unaffordable demands.

I’m not going to repeat every single thing I’ve said about each topic as a caveat in every comment if I’m refuting a specific claim made by a poster, such as the nonsense claims by pensioners that working-aged people claiming benefits is the primary cause of the UK’s economic problems: I will simply respond and refute that specific nonsense in that specific comment. It doesn’t mean that’s my entire view of the whole economy because I happen to be making a comment about one specific issue in response to someone (then, as always, got piled on by more of the self-righteous retirees).

The views I have expressed in this thread have not all been about the impact of retirees on the UK budget, and I have backed up what I have written when it has been disputed with data and charts unlike the vast majority of others commenting on the thread. My comments have been nuanced and based on the evidenced facts and economic reality per the data over decades, and covered multiple facets of the problem, and included references to data from other countries who used to be our comparators and who - despite facing the same external geopolitical pressures and ageing population issues with which the UK is contending - are not suffering anywhere near the same level of economic decline and fall in living standards that the UK populace is experiencing. The reason for that is economic mismanagement as I have highlighted, and unfortunately a very large proportion of people don’t seem to have any grasp of the changes that are actually required in order to improve things and instead have a bee in their bonnet about things which will make little if any difference at all.

Pathetic. I have posted data and graphs. If you wish to refute this data from the ONS and Government Departments etc. then you will need to post your data which, apparently, you believe is more valid.

I’m sure the tumbleweed while we wait for it will last long beyond any period that one could reasonably assume that you can be sleeping. There’ll probably be more facetious and nonsensical comments tomorrow, but I’m pretty certain that your “data” that “feels right” to you won’t be forthcoming: data which comes from any credible but as yet unnamed source that it seems you believe we should accept as being more valid than, and apparently refutes ,the published and verified data produced by the ONS and UK Government which I’ve used in my analyses and graphs.

Blossomtoes posted that "Over 5.4 million Britons aged 70+ pay income tax, a number that outpaces the total taxpayers aged under 30".

I looked this up and it seems that actually "Around 8.3 million people of state pension age paid income tax in 2024/25, up from 5.9 million in 2011/12 - although to be fair maybe BlossomToes is excluding younger pensioners (any reason?).

However, with there being just over 13 million pensioners in the UK and with income tax kicking in just above £12,570 a year does that mean 5 million pensioners live on their state pension alone plus any extra benefits that comes with that (presumably not much extra?). While I'm more than aware that there are lots of very wealthy pensioners, I had thought that the numbers who didn't have any extra income over and above their pensions was lower. I had honestly thought that maybe 20% of pensioners lived on this tiny amount but it seems it is much higher. That said, I am in favour or pensioners who have far more substantial incomes paying in a bit more.

“grabby and entitled people”
“destructive behaviour”
“the entitled over 65s who are making unaffordable demands”
“the older cohorts who have already taken far more from the country than they will ever contribute”
“their own generation that screwed our economy and continues to do so”
“self-righteous retirees”
“a large proportion of the older generation refuse to accept economic facts”
“If people refuse to change their entitled behaviour”

villain
noun
/ˈvɪlən/

1. The main bad character in a story, play, etc.

He often plays the part of the villain.

1. A person who is morally bad or responsible for causing trouble or harm

Idioms
The villain of the piece
the person or thing that is responsible for all the trouble in a situation

Having graphs and economic terminology does not make you an oracle. Like I said, economists, policymakers and financial institutions played a major role in creating many of the structural problems the UK now faces.

The post-war generation born between 1946 and 1964 did not suddenly appear at retirement age out of nowhere. Those born earliest started retiring around 2006. Birth rates have been falling since the mid-1960s, so governments and policymakers had literally decades to prepare for the economic and fiscal implications of an ageing population and a shrinking workforce.

So with all that time on their hands, it's reasonable to ask what planning was actually done. Why did we have decades of ever increasing housing shortages? Why did productivity stagnate for so long? Why did policy become increasingly reliant on debt, asset inflation and rising house prices? Why were North Sea oil revenues not used more strategically? Why was reliance on expensive, badly negotiated long-term PFI expanded? What could have been done with the long-term revenues from utilities like water companies if those assets had remained publicly owned?. Ordinary retirees did not make those decisions. Governments, institutions, policymakers and economists did.

The increasing cost of pensions and age related spending is not simply because pensioners suddenly became older. Nor is it because they are greedy, selfish or want to screw the young over. It is because successive governments and policymakers failed to plan adequately despite having decades to prepare for demographic changes that were entirely foreseeable.

Instead of taking responsibility for those long-term policy failures, there often seems to be a greater willingness to blame PAYE workers and pensioners, whilst continuing to transfer more and more public assets, infrastructure and revenue streams into private profit, all while socialising the long-term costs and pressures of those decisions across wider society.

If people want to be angry at something, they should be angry at all the squandered revenue streams, poor planning and long-term policy failures that helped create the situation we are now in.

David Cameron got DLA for his son.

All your posts here have done is demonstrate your total incomprehension of even the most basic maths that my primary school children understand

The facetious insults are all in one direction. An economist who wished to be taken seriously would accept that an assertion that 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.

A difference of £500k between generations would make all but the most gullible raise an eyebrow, particularly when 11% of people of state pension age are still higher tax payers, obviously a much higher percentage of those people would have been when they were salaried.

I thought I was going to have an interesting and nuanced debate with an expert who would be happy to explain how their conclusions had been reached. It’s disappointing that hasn’t been the case.

Agree with this.
It's difficult to take someone seriously (and they clearly do want to be taken very seriously) when they just cannot mask their agenda and get pretty nasty when questioned.
@DrRylandGrace you may be an economist but you are not presenting your findings in a neuteral way and contempt for pensioners is dripping from every post.
So what is your solution then?