Andy Street is Co-Chair of Prosper UK, served as the first Mayor of the West Midlands, and was formerly Managing Director of John Lewis.
One of the reasons I set up Prosper UK this year, with Ruth Davidson and the rest of our board, is that our politics has picked up a bad habit.
The parties leading the polls have decided the way to win is to promise that nothing hard will ever be asked of anyone. I want to explain why that is a dead end, and why the pensions triple lock has become the clearest test of whether a politician will level with people.
Look at how the triple lock is now discussed.
Reform has promised to keep it in full, whatever it costs. Labour, whoever leads the party, shows no sign of facing a welfare bill heading for £406 billion by the end of the decade. Both offer the same thing, easy answers now and the bill sent to someone else later. I spent my career in business before I led a region, and there is a plain word for an organisation run that way. It is insolvent.
For over 30 years I worked in a partnership where the figures were never optional. At John Lewis we shared the profits with staff through a bonus. During my time as Managing Director, good bonuses were paid every year, and we were proud of it. It was never fixed. In a good year it was generous, in a leaner year it was smaller, because you cannot hand out money the business has not earned without weakening the company and every job in it. It was widely admired. It was the only honest way to run things, and it is the instinct we try to bring to everything Prosper UK does.
The triple lock runs opposite to that instinct. Under the triple lock the state pension rises each year by the highest of three factors, inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5 per cent, and never the lowest, so the cost only travels one way. The state pension alone will cost around £146 billion this year, close to a 5 per cent of everything the country earns. By the end of the decade the lock will add roughly £15.5 billion a year on top of an earnings link, about three times what anyone expected at the start. Who pays for that? The young. Almost a million people aged 16 to 24 are already out of work, education or training, and on the current path, holding pension costs steady would push their retirement age towards 74.
We are asking them to work longer and pay more so the rest of us can avoid one hard conversation.
There is another reason this cannot be put off. A promise can keep voters comfortable for a while, but it will not fool the people who lend the country money. The markets watch what a country spends against what it earns, and when they lose confidence they charge more to lend. We have seen how fast that turns, and the price is not paid in Westminster. It is paid in higher mortgage costs and lost jobs, by the same working families the promise was meant to protect.
So why not change? There is one number that has silenced every party. Around two thirds of the public say they want the triple lock left exactly as it is. Every leader reads that and decides the argument is over. I read it the other way. A big majority for a policy does not make it affordable or right. It makes the lack of leadership harder to excuse. The job of a leader is not to read the polls back to people and call it courage. It is to explain, more than once if needed, why something that looked affordable in 2011 will not hold by 2040.
None of this is new, for me or for the movement we have built. Last month Prosper UK published a paper, A Fairer Welfare System, setting out the case for a smoothed earnings link. The pension keeps pace with earnings, stays protected against inflation, and the poorest pensioners are safeguarded through Pension Credit as they are now. David Gauke, Prosper UK Vice Chair, has argued the same case on this site more than once. There is nothing radical in it. Make no mistake, plenty of serious people agree with every word in private, then lose their nerve the moment a camera appears.
Let me be clear who this is for, because the easy charge is that people who make this case want to punish older generations. I want no such thing.
Pensioners deserve the best pension possible, but that is not the same as a formula that only ever climbs, whatever the state of the public finances. Most pensioners have children and grandchildren, and they can see what is being done to the next generation in their name. A fair settlement protects those in need and asks the same discipline of pension spending that we already ask of every working household. That is fairness in both directions.
Our welfare paper is one piece of something bigger.
Over the coming months Prosper UK will bring the same plain speaking to the questions the main parties keep dodging. On Europe, we will set out the real choices and what each would cost. On immigration, we will say clearly the numbers have been too high, while backing the migration that grows the economy. On energy, we will be honest about the costs and the timescales. Our next policy proposal, on devolution, will be published later this month, and it makes a case I learned leading a region, that better decisions are made closer to the people who live with them.
We built Prosper UK because the centre ground is not empty for want of support. It is empty because the people who ought to hold it have gone quiet and left the field to others who are louder but with simplistic answers. There is a lazy idea in Westminster that the centre is the cautious place, the safe middle where you dodge the hard choices. It is the opposite. The honest work I have described here is the demanding work, and it is exactly what the main parties keep backing away from. People in this country want a serious economy run by serious people, and they can spot a promise that is too good to be true.
The country is not asking to be misled. It is waiting to be treated as adults, and that is what Prosper UK is here to do.