Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
Over the past few days, I have been receiving replies on X from pensioners informing me that I am selfish, ignorant, cruel, and, my personal favourite, a “lefty” for questioning the triple lock.
This has confused me.
Because there is nothing remotely radical, still less left-wing, about saying that a heavily indebted country with an ageing population should stop handing an ever-rising universal benefit to people who often own far more wealth than the workers paying for it. That is not socialism. It is fiscal conservatism. Yet the moment you say it, the argument seems to leave the world of public finance altogether and enter something closer to moral theatre.
And the reaction would make more sense if the numbers were on their side. They are not.
The triple lock, for those uninitiated, guarantees that the state pension rises each year by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5 per cent. This year it delivered a 4.8 per cent increase, taking the full new state pension to £241.30 a week. It is presented as a modest guarantee of dignity in old age.
In practice, it has become something much larger: a politically untouchable commitment to keep transferring more resources to one of the richest age groups in the country, regardless of the wider condition of the public finances.
And let us clear away one of the most persistent myths in this argument. The state pension is not a little pot with your name on it, sitting patiently in Whitehall until the day you collect it. It is not your personal money, nobly returned.
It is, as described by the ONS, a pay-as-you-go transfer funded by current taxpayers. Today’s workers fund today’s pensioners. That matters because it changes the nature of the argument. The question is not whether the state is honouring some private claim. The question is who pays, who benefits, and whether the arrangement still makes sense under present conditions.
And increasingly, it does not.
The sentimental picture of the pensioner as permanently hard-up and vulnerable has not kept pace with economic reality. Many pensioners are poor, and they should be protected. But many are not poor at all.
ONS wealth data shows that median household wealth is highest among those aged 65 to 74, at £502,500. By contrast, for households headed by someone aged 16 to 24 it is just £15,200. Full Fact, using ONS figures, found that about 27 per cent of over-65s live in households with total wealth above £1 million. That does not mean every pensioner is rich. It does mean that the blanket language of pensioner hardship is no longer an adequate basis for universal policy.
This is what makes the current arrangement so difficult to defend. Around 55 per cent of all social security spending now goes to pensioners. In 2025 to 2026, the Department for Work and Pensions forecasts £177.8 billion of spending on benefits for pensioners in Great Britain, including £146.1 billion on the state pension alone. That is a larger sum than current planned defence spending of £62.2 billion, and also larger than the 2025–26 core schools budget of £65.3 billion.
State pension spending alone is more than twice either figure. Pensioner benefit spending as a whole is larger than defence and the core schools budget combined.
The long-run projections are even worse. In its 2025 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report, the OBR says state pension spending is projected to rise by 3.1 percentage points of GDP over the next 50 years. Of that, around half is attributed to the triple lock alone. So when critics like me say the policy is no longer affordable in its present form, we are not being ‘melodramatic, we are simply restating the OBR’s arithmetic.
And this is not happening in a static country. Britain is ageing fast. In 1972, those aged 65 and over made up around 13 per cent of the population. By 2023 it was 18.9 per cent. By the early 2070s, around the time I will be approaching retirement age, the figure is projected to be roughly 27 per cent. That is not a minor demographic tweak. It changes the entire economics of the state pension.
A system designed for one age structure becomes much harder to sustain under another. The OBR projects that spending on the state pension will rise from about 5 per cent of GDP to 7.7 per cent by 2073, with the triple lock itself accounting for roughly half of that increase. In other words, this is not merely age catching up with us. It is policy choice amplifying demographic pressure.
And still no major party wants to say the obvious.
Reform, which likes to talk as though it alone is willing to utter forbidden truths, has confirmed it too will stick with the triple lock. Of course it will. All the parties support it because older voters are numerous, disciplined, and far more likely to turn up at the ballot box.
In the 2024 British Election Study, turnout among the over-66s was 88.6 per cent. Among 18 to 25 year olds it was 65.4 per cent. Parties protect the triple lock not because it is economically sound, but out of cowardice because they know which age groups vote most heavily and most reliably.
I was born in 2006. My generation is expected to finance this arrangement for decades while being gently told not to be melodramatic about it. We are told to save more privately, accept later retirement, shoulder high rents, tolerate a crushing housing market, and pay what the OBR expects will be the highest tax burden in modern British history.
We are expected to fund a system whose generosity to us, when our turn comes, looks increasingly doubtful. We will pay the bill, service the debt, and quite possibly never enjoy the same settlement ourselves. That is not solidarity. It is extraction.
The nastiness of the response online says something important. People get very angry about pensions because this is no longer just a dispute about policy. It is a dispute about status and power.
Suggest that wealthy pensioners should not receive automatic universal increases, and you are told that you hate the elderly. Suggest means-testing, and people react as if you have proposed a return to the workhouse. Suggest that someone in a large, mortgage-free family home might consider downsizing before demanding still more from taxpayers in rented flats, and you are denounced as a monster.
There is also something deeply odd about the ideological shape of the backlash. I can argue against universal pensioner benefits, against structural deficits, against adding to an already swollen debt pile, and still be called a “leftist”.
This is where Steve Davies’s theory of the great realignment becomes useful. The old argument between left and right has been scrambled. Cultural identity and political tribe now often matter more than coherent economics.
So people who once might have called themselves fiscally conservative now defend a vast, universal, debt-funded transfer to affluent pensioners. In that environment, questioning the triple lock does not register as a debate about tax, spending, and welfare design. It registers as a symbolic attack on a protected group.
But symbolism does not pay the bills.
I would love Britain to be rich enough to shower every pensioner with more money every year. I would be delighted if the Treasury could say yes to everyone, forever. But money does not grow on trees.
More money for pensioners means more money taken from workers, more borrowing, or less money for everything else. That is the choice. There is no painless fourth option.
Britain likes to think of itself as a compassionate country. Fine. Then let us be compassionate towards poor pensioners, not indiscriminately generous to rich ones.
Let us stop pretending that millionaire households need universal handouts from indebted twenty-somethings like me. Let us stop treating it as cruelty to notice who pays. And let us at least be honest about what the triple lock has become: not a narrow guarantee against poverty, but a very large and politically protected transfer to the most electorally powerful age bloc in the country.
Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
Over the past few days, I have been receiving replies on X from pensioners informing me that I am selfish, ignorant, cruel, and, my personal favourite, a “lefty” for questioning the triple lock.
This has confused me.
Because there is nothing remotely radical, still less left-wing, about saying that a heavily indebted country with an ageing population should stop handing an ever-rising universal benefit to people who often own far more wealth than the workers paying for it. That is not socialism. It is fiscal conservatism. Yet the moment you say it, the argument seems to leave the world of public finance altogether and enter something closer to moral theatre.
And the reaction would make more sense if the numbers were on their side. They are not.
The triple lock, for those uninitiated, guarantees that the state pension rises each year by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5 per cent. This year it delivered a 4.8 per cent increase, taking the full new state pension to £241.30 a week. It is presented as a modest guarantee of dignity in old age.
In practice, it has become something much larger: a politically untouchable commitment to keep transferring more resources to one of the richest age groups in the country, regardless of the wider condition of the public finances.
And let us clear away one of the most persistent myths in this argument. The state pension is not a little pot with your name on it, sitting patiently in Whitehall until the day you collect it. It is not your personal money, nobly returned.
It is, as described by the ONS, a pay-as-you-go transfer funded by current taxpayers. Today’s workers fund today’s pensioners. That matters because it changes the nature of the argument. The question is not whether the state is honouring some private claim. The question is who pays, who benefits, and whether the arrangement still makes sense under present conditions.
And increasingly, it does not.
The sentimental picture of the pensioner as permanently hard-up and vulnerable has not kept pace with economic reality. Many pensioners are poor, and they should be protected. But many are not poor at all.
ONS wealth data shows that median household wealth is highest among those aged 65 to 74, at £502,500. By contrast, for households headed by someone aged 16 to 24 it is just £15,200. Full Fact, using ONS figures, found that about 27 per cent of over-65s live in households with total wealth above £1 million. That does not mean every pensioner is rich. It does mean that the blanket language of pensioner hardship is no longer an adequate basis for universal policy.
This is what makes the current arrangement so difficult to defend. Around 55 per cent of all social security spending now goes to pensioners. In 2025 to 2026, the Department for Work and Pensions forecasts £177.8 billion of spending on benefits for pensioners in Great Britain, including £146.1 billion on the state pension alone. That is a larger sum than current planned defence spending of £62.2 billion, and also larger than the 2025–26 core schools budget of £65.3 billion.
State pension spending alone is more than twice either figure. Pensioner benefit spending as a whole is larger than defence and the core schools budget combined.
The long-run projections are even worse. In its 2025 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report, the OBR says state pension spending is projected to rise by 3.1 percentage points of GDP over the next 50 years. Of that, around half is attributed to the triple lock alone. So when critics like me say the policy is no longer affordable in its present form, we are not being ‘melodramatic, we are simply restating the OBR’s arithmetic.
And this is not happening in a static country. Britain is ageing fast. In 1972, those aged 65 and over made up around 13 per cent of the population. By 2023 it was 18.9 per cent. By the early 2070s, around the time I will be approaching retirement age, the figure is projected to be roughly 27 per cent. That is not a minor demographic tweak. It changes the entire economics of the state pension.
A system designed for one age structure becomes much harder to sustain under another. The OBR projects that spending on the state pension will rise from about 5 per cent of GDP to 7.7 per cent by 2073, with the triple lock itself accounting for roughly half of that increase. In other words, this is not merely age catching up with us. It is policy choice amplifying demographic pressure.
And still no major party wants to say the obvious.
Reform, which likes to talk as though it alone is willing to utter forbidden truths, has confirmed it too will stick with the triple lock. Of course it will. All the parties support it because older voters are numerous, disciplined, and far more likely to turn up at the ballot box.
In the 2024 British Election Study, turnout among the over-66s was 88.6 per cent. Among 18 to 25 year olds it was 65.4 per cent. Parties protect the triple lock not because it is economically sound, but out of cowardice because they know which age groups vote most heavily and most reliably.
I was born in 2006. My generation is expected to finance this arrangement for decades while being gently told not to be melodramatic about it. We are told to save more privately, accept later retirement, shoulder high rents, tolerate a crushing housing market, and pay what the OBR expects will be the highest tax burden in modern British history.
We are expected to fund a system whose generosity to us, when our turn comes, looks increasingly doubtful. We will pay the bill, service the debt, and quite possibly never enjoy the same settlement ourselves. That is not solidarity. It is extraction.
The nastiness of the response online says something important. People get very angry about pensions because this is no longer just a dispute about policy. It is a dispute about status and power.
Suggest that wealthy pensioners should not receive automatic universal increases, and you are told that you hate the elderly. Suggest means-testing, and people react as if you have proposed a return to the workhouse. Suggest that someone in a large, mortgage-free family home might consider downsizing before demanding still more from taxpayers in rented flats, and you are denounced as a monster.
There is also something deeply odd about the ideological shape of the backlash. I can argue against universal pensioner benefits, against structural deficits, against adding to an already swollen debt pile, and still be called a “leftist”.
This is where Steve Davies’s theory of the great realignment becomes useful. The old argument between left and right has been scrambled. Cultural identity and political tribe now often matter more than coherent economics.
So people who once might have called themselves fiscally conservative now defend a vast, universal, debt-funded transfer to affluent pensioners. In that environment, questioning the triple lock does not register as a debate about tax, spending, and welfare design. It registers as a symbolic attack on a protected group.
But symbolism does not pay the bills.
I would love Britain to be rich enough to shower every pensioner with more money every year. I would be delighted if the Treasury could say yes to everyone, forever. But money does not grow on trees.
More money for pensioners means more money taken from workers, more borrowing, or less money for everything else. That is the choice. There is no painless fourth option.
Britain likes to think of itself as a compassionate country. Fine. Then let us be compassionate towards poor pensioners, not indiscriminately generous to rich ones.
Let us stop pretending that millionaire households need universal handouts from indebted twenty-somethings like me. Let us stop treating it as cruelty to notice who pays. And let us at least be honest about what the triple lock has become: not a narrow guarantee against poverty, but a very large and politically protected transfer to the most electorally powerful age bloc in the country.