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!

No it's not like all other benefis. To be entitled to a pension you have to have achieved a certain level of contributions over a specific number of years. It is a cintributions based entitlement. For accounting cinvenience it may sit under welfare but it is not a welfare benefit.

Even Rachel Reeves is careful to distinguish between the two types of benefit.

There is money in the general system available to one group of people that isn’t available to another group of people
So if we’re taking an average number, one particular group of people has a lot and the other particular group of people has a little, but everybody is paying the average.
I hope that was basic enough for you, but there are lots of ChatGPT apps available. That could probably break it down further.

oh, and I missed it because you didn’t quote me in it. Today is a big day of learning for you.
If you’d like an answer so you need to let the person know you’re asking a question.

Do you not realise that a 4.8% rise on the meagre state pension (already much less than other European countries) - £184.90 for people who retired before 2016 and after 2016 retirees £241.30 per week does not equate to living the high life. In comparison minimum wage is now £487.88 per week. Out of their pensions, people still have to pay the going rate for Council Tax, Energy, Water bills and food as people who are working. Even with the triple lock pensioners are falling behind in what they can afford. And there aren’t as many pensioners being the richest in society as you like to imagine. Here’s a challenge for you all: try to live on £184.90 per week for three months and see how you fare.

"Welfare spending is the biggest source of AME spending, with pensioner spending the biggest item in the social security budget (accounting for 48.1 per cent of the total in 2023-24). The state pension is the largest single item of welfare spending, forecast to make up 42 per cent of the total in 2023-24. The system for pensioners who retired before April 2016 comprises the basic state pension (paying up to £156.20 a week in 2023-24) and the state second pension which is mostly related to prior earnings. Since April 2016, these have been replaced by a ‘single-tier’ (flat-rate) state pension for newly retired pensioners (paying £203.85 per week in 2023-24)." From the office for budget responsibily.

The state pension is classed as a benefit because of the way it is money that is given to pensioners by the government and the government is wholly within its power to increase or decrease payments or decide you are no longer eligible for it and stop giving it to you by changing the eligibility criteria without needing your consent to do so, because it's not actually yours the way your private pension is. Pensioners need to understand they have not saved their own pension with the government, when they worked they paid for pensioners of the times pension through their tax payments and the workers of today are paying for their pension now through tax payments.

There are many benefits where you have to meet certain age limits or complete certain activities to be entitled to claim them. That doesn't make them "Not welfare".

Completely agree. Mine has gone to 67 too.

That bitching and blame reminds me of the poem. “First They Came” was a warning about the danger of normalising selective blame. Increasingly, it feels as though we are seeing a modern economic version of that mindset being normalised.

First it was landlords. Then pensioners. Then savers. Then homeowners. Now even students and graduates are increasingly being folded into the same narrative.

More and more people are being framed as “the problem” for doing exactly what society encouraged for decades: study, work, pay taxes, save into a pension and try to build some long-term security so you are less dependent on the state later in life. Yet the moment many people finally begin to achieve some of those things, the rules increasingly seem to change around them.

The cumulative effect matters. Income tax. National Insurance. Student loan repayments. Housing costs. Pension contributions. Frozen thresholds and fiscal drag. And that is before many of the full effects of incoming measures and tax rises have even filtered through.

Those pressures disproportionately fall on ordinary working professionals, dual-income households, graduates, private pension savers and homeowners: broad sections of the economically productive middle / those that have lifted themsrlves from poverty are already contributing heavily through work, taxation and long-term self-provision.

At the same time, the language shifts as well. Landlords become “economic units”. Pensioners become “fiscal burdens”. Savers are framed as “wealth hoarders”. Homeowners are portrayed as sitting on “unearned wealth”.

People do not live in “housing stock”. They live in homes, families and communities.

Perhaps most worrying of all is how resistant many people now seem to serious engagement with these issues. Complex structural problems around housing, demographics, productivity, growth and long-term economic strategy are often reduced to simplistic moral narratives about “greedy pensioners” or “privileged homeowners”. I guess its's easier to direct anger towards visible groups than confront deeper structural failures.

The UK already struggles with weak productivity growth, strained infrastructure and extremely high housing costs relative to earnings. Should policy not be far more focused on growth, investment and long-term economic sustainability rather than continually revisiting the same broad groups for additional revenue whenever fiscal pressures emerge?

A serious economy cannot endlessly rely on redistribution and blame while neglecting productivity, investment and growth.

Sadly predictable

You missed mine too. What age are you?

👏

I have already acknowledged that the State Pension sits within welfare spending in accounting terms. My point is that it is not the same thing as means-tested welfare like Universal Credit.

The State Pension is based on qualifying National Insurance contributions built up, by the individual, over decades and subject to qualifying years. Todays NI payer pay fir tidays pensioners. That is materially different from benefits based mainly on current financial circumstances.

People are perfectly capable of understanding those differences. Not everything under the welfare budget is interchangeable or works in the same way just because it sits under the same Treasury heading.

But if you have too much in savings you can't claim UC.

I was made redundant last year, a welcome boost to our depleted savings, but it means we can't claim UC (which we'd be eligible for otherwise) without spending the savings. I desperately don't want to spend the savings as it might be our last chance to have what is, for us at least, a reasonable amount of savings. So we're just trying to manage as best we can.

I have two pensions, last statement from each them predicted an income of around 1k a year from each. DH has fuck all pension, and now earns fuck all self employed because it means he can work around our autistic son's needs. So I cover 95% of all costs except the car, which DH pays for. I'm now on a lower wage with higher travel costs, so no option to put extra in my pension.

I do feel a bit trapped by trying to be sensible. I am trying to have a pension, I am trying to have savings, I'm trying to be financially responsible, but it does feel like you get penalised a bit for that.

You can claim 6 months of the Job Seeker element as it's contributions based rather than means tested.

Yes you have to qualify for the state pension. Buy it is still a benefit in that it is tax payers money being given to you at a rate decided by the government, and if the government decided to stop giving it to you one day, they could. Because they have that power, because it's not your money. They are literally within their rights to one day decide the eligibility criteria has changed and you don't meet it anymore so no more pension for you. it's not your own money that you have saved and are guaranteed to have it/own it until it's run out. The fact that you don't own it, you only get it if you meet certain eligibility criteria and the government can change that criteria and stop giving it to you if they want to is what makes it benefit.

Is part of the welfare state because the whole point of a pension is to give money to people who aren't earning enough to live on, just like UC and JSA. The difference is people on JSA aren't earning enough to live on because they can't get a job. Pensioners aren't earning enough to live on because they are old. If the government decided no more state pension, you have to work or claim JSA like younger people, they could.

My earlier posts on the thread stated precisely this: that the auto-enrolment opt out needs to be removed and pension saving made mandatory because too many people who could afford to save are being irresponsible and not doing so. I also stated that a similar mandatory scheme needs to be put in place for the self-employed unless they can demonstrate sufficient assets to self-fund retirement and a pension is therefore not necessary (13% of the workforce derive their income solely from self-employment and only a tiny percentage of them make any pension savings at all).

It seems some people here zeroed in on specific comments of mine that would disadvantage them without reading the others and then started trying to discredit me because they didn’t like the facts I presented on one particular matter. This happens regularly here and is precisely why the UK economy is such a mess with no sustainable long-term planning based on evidence: people are not prepared to contemplate anything that might disadvantage them personally even when it is necessary.

The state pension needs to be means-tested. For me personally this will mean I don’t get one despite having funded those claiming one currently. It still needs to happen and trying to find spurious reasons to reject this mathematical necessity just because it would disadvantage me would be irrational and ridiculous. We need people to behave like adults and capable of looking at the big picture but many refuse to do so.

Meanwhile, as I also stated we need a credible industrial strategy, huge investment in infrastructure and education, to adopt a functional healthcare model similar to our European neighbours, and a total overhaul of the UK tax system to remove cliff edges and levy tax on a household unit basis like all other sensible countries in order to remove perverse incentives and distortions and raise productivity and growth which is the only way to sustainably raise living standards.

Due to our dysfunctional political and electorial system, our largely economically illiterate electorate and the refusal of large numbers of people to accept the changes that need to be made or have any sense if social responsibility - preferring to try to find scapegoats and bang on endlessly about what are often trivial irrelevancies from an economic perspective - I highly doubt that this will happen and therefore living standards in the UK will continue to decline. We don’t have a single UK party even prepared to put forward the evidence-based policies required to improve things let alone one capable of actually implementing them.

What?

These responses are hilarious.

No, I am British. Why would I be making detailed comments about the UK economy if I was American?! Why would I even care?

The attempts to try to invent ways to discredit anything uncomfortable to hear really are off the charts. 📊

I think you’ll find it’s politicians and the electorate ignoring economists who have achieved that. The Brexit voters, for a start, and many more including the current and previous Governments over recent decades. 👏

I’ve written exactly what I would do as a basic starting point to fix UK economic policy several times.

It wasn't to discredit you. You used the term "welfare" which isn't commonly used in the UK. I read that one post. I can't discredit you for the rest as I haven't read them. Just scrolled past.

That is literally how all benefits and the state pension are classified in the national budget. Do you think the DWP is American?!

Why would it raise an eyebrow given the spending levels by cohort and differentials in tax rates/ inflation/ salaries asa proportion of GDP/ tax threshold reduction in real terms/ reduction of reliefs, far higher state pension costs for far many more years being paid from current tax revenue, far higher healthcare and care costs for longer being paid from current tax revenue, declining share of GDP being used for infrastructure and education therefore falling productivity alongside far higher taxes on the same real-terms income, student loans which are effectively another tax that has to be paid when higher education or adult learning was previously free/ highly subsidised, no MIRAS now, the higher rate tax band to pay 40% would begin at nearly £100k if it had been uprated with inflation each year…. Etc? When you put all of this together is it really surprising to you that people now are paying far, far more than they receive in welfare and services, to pay back the debt of those who took out far more than they contributed? This is a simple, evidenced fact not something up for debate. You can look up the studies yourself.

If you can’t understand the compound impact of that over a lifetime (and hence the national debt run up as well due to the ongoing over-extraction from the state exceeding contributions in tax over many decades, which now means £100bn of tax money per year is used just to pay the interest on the debt - around double the entire defence budget and far exceeding the entire budget for education!) then I’m not sure anybody can explain it to you because it is mathematically verified from data in large scale peer reviewed economic research, and hardly just a niche issue of which only economists are aware; some of the economic studies on this have also been widely reported in newpapers such as The Times (despite its very anti-young people stance in general due to its current editorial staffing and readership demographic).

It’s hardly my fault that you are commenting on threads about economics without having bothered to research anything about it at all, even reports and research highlighted numerous times by mainstream media.

I opted out to pay off (quite a chunk of) debt. I've since opted back in. I followed Martin Lewis' advice to do this.

Do you have anything constructive to add other than well know facts and sticks and stones? We all know the facts. We are more interested in sustainable solutions not strawmen.

You’ve not heard the term “welfare state” in the UK?

Why ask if you’re not interested? What a waste of everyone’s time.

It’s pretty obvious that your intention was to attempt to cast aspersions on me. Perhaps engage in the discussion about economics if you wish rather than trying to discredit facts presented by other posters by asking them it they are “foreign”, which for some reason seems to be some kind of obsession with certain people in the UK now.