Andy Burnham given major warning over triple-lock | Politics | News
Instead of jumping on the anti-Triple Lock bandwagon, the OECD should keep its nose out of the UK’s detailed policies on pensions. His recommendation that the Triple Lock be scrapped is based on the false premise that this vital protection leads to “fiscal uncertainty”.
The opposite is also true; The Triple Lock aims to protect older people from financial uncertainty caused by sharp increases in the cost of living or shock events such as oil wars and pandemics. The Triple Lock is not the cause of uncertainty; This is the necessary reaction to this!
The report fails to note that the value of our basic state pension is so much lower than almost all of our economic rivals that millions of pensioners who depend on state pensions as their main source of income are close to the poverty line. If pensioners in the UK enjoyed the luxury of a state pension, set at around two-thirds of their average earnings rather than a third, as in most OECD countries, I would be happy to discuss ending the Triple Lock.
OECD bureaucrats in the Paris Chateau offices have no idea what it’s like to live on the old £185-a-week state pension; in fact, that’s probably how much their daily lunch blast costs.
Scrapping the Triple Lock would result in a sudden increase in pensioners’ poverty, as energy prices and food prices tend to rise faster than the general rate of inflation, and these costs make up a larger proportion of older people’s budgets than the rest of the population.
The message that the Triple Lock is “unsustainable” is a much-repeated political judgment, but it has no basis in fact. Society must decide whether the elderly can be enabled to live with dignity and warmth in their retirement years, and then find the money to make this possible. With our state pension at such a low level, scrapping the Triple Lock would have life or death consequences for many pensioners, and Lock’s critics need to start being honest about the consequences of their insidious campaign.
