The pensions triple lock is a travesty. Our politicians must fess up
We report this week that the OECD has added itself to a growing list of institutions warning over the sustainability of Britain’s triple lock pensions system, the policy that guarantees the state pension rises annually by the highest of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 per cent.
The triple lock, the Paris-based OECD warns, is “unusually generous in international comparison” and reform of it is “necessary to reduce fiscal risks”.
It is a damning indictment of our current crop of politicians that a risk to our public finances so great it is talked about internationally is so totally ignored domestically.
The state pension is already by far the biggest area of welfare spending. It accounts for about double the amount spent on universal credit and four times that spent on housing benefits. One pound in every two collected in income tax is spent on the state pension.
This will get much worse. The OBR projects that over the next 50 years, the triple lock will push up spending on the state pension to as much as nine per cent of GDP, dwarfing every other area of departmental spending. It will transform the state from a government with a pensions service attached to a pensions service with a government attached.
The triple lock, therefore, is the single-biggest threat to the stability of our public finances and it must be binned urgently. Committing to it is the surest mark of fiscal irresponsibility.
Yet none of our major political parties are prepared to step up and admit that this anachronistic policy has to go. They have prioritised short-term electoral advantage over the long-term stability of our economy.
Time to act
Something has got to give. UK government borrowing costs are already the highest in the G7, and there is precious little room to increase taxes after two rounds of bruising budgets collected an extra £66bn in receipts. The tax burden is now the highest since the Second World War. Bringing forward the increase to the retirement age is not enough.
There is an opportunity for a sensible political leader to pick up the mantle and put the public finances back on an even keel. To admit that the real dilemma is not whether we should keep the triple-locked state pension, but whether, if the policy is not soon torn up, we can afford any kind of state pension at all.
If they don’t, it will be the role of another international body, one which last intervened in our public finances in the 1970s, to do their work for them.