It’s time for all parties to agree to end the pensions triple lock

Editorial: Pensioners have gained enough from 13 years of guaranteed increases; it’s time to tilt the balance in favour of the young

Angela Rayner addresses the TUC in Liverpool on Tuesday (PA)

Britain’s “triple lock” policy for uprating state pensions was justified in an era of widespread pensioner poverty. The state pension was too low, and it made sense to commit to a long-term mechanism for uprating it in alignment with the highest of three measures: the inflation rate, wage growth, or 2.5 per cent a year.

It guaranteed that, over time, the pension would rise in real terms, and take a greater share of national income, even accounting for the rise in the proportion of old people in the population.

However, it was a policy that horrified the brightest minds in the Treasury, who could see it occupying a larger and larger share of public spending over a period stretching beyond the visible horizon of any economic forecasting. They worried about the simplistic electoral politics of it: that no party could advocate bringing it to an end because of the growing number of pensioners in the electorate, and their greater propensity to turn out to vote.