Pensioner-dependent Tories have set the UK on the road to ruin
There is an election coming, so reforms that harm the finances of older voters are off the table.
The over-50s dominate participation in local polls even more than they do in general elections, so it was little wonder that a proposal to bring forward the date when the state pension age starts to rise to 68 – adversely affecting millions of people born in the 1970s – was considered toxic by the government and kicked into touch at the end of last month.
A delay of at least two years before the plans for the pension age could be reconsidered was described by the pensions minister Mel Stride as “appropriate” now that people are dying younger, on average, than pre-Covid forecasts had expected.
Stride might more accurately have said the delay was politically expedient, with a view to preventing a total meltdown of the Tory vote in council and mayoral elections next month across England, and in the general election next year.
Yet retirement is a crucial topic that ministers must debate, and not just because it represents a huge and growing cost to the state. Just as pressing is the likelihood that the wrong kind of reform will increase inequality and not ease it, both among those who are retired and between generations.
An independent report, written for Stride and published alongside his decision not to bring forward the pension age rise, highlighted the cost to the public purse.
It said spending on pensions, health and social care, currently 15.1% of GDP, will rise to 25.6% by the 2070s as the number of pensioners increases from 12 million to 17 million.
The report’s author, Lucy Neville-Rolfe, a Conservative peer, said she agreed with a government aim to limit the rise in state pension costs over the same period from 4.5% to 6% of
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