The last chance to save the triple lock

An excellent post Pippa. Thank you for researching the facts about this.

Thanks maddyone. It's mostly a summary of an article by The National Pensioners Convention but it did seem important we know the facts.

Dept of Work and Pensions have "promised that the Triple Lock will only be suspended for this year and will be reinstated next year" but if they renege on it this year, they'll renege on it again. The pension pot has always been an easy piggy bank to raid.

Even if it were only to be one year Chewbacca pensioners would still feel the increasing effect of that every year. Each year State Pensions would be "missing" an increasing amount. Because of compound interest, not only would current pensioners would be worse off because of this missing amount, those joining the scheme in 10 or 20 years will get a lower pension than they would have done. It is not just today's pensioners who will be affected; it is future pensioners too.

Taxing "unearned" income would be one way of paying for this but we already know that there is £37 billion in the "pot" marked "National Insurance Fund" in the Governments accounts. Not making this cut would cost a little less than £5 billion. Tax Research

Are there any petitions at the moment? I haven't received anything from my usual sources.

Do you pay NI once you reach state pension age?
I thought it stopped

It does stop - at the moment, but the govt are proposing that any one in employment over the retirement age should continue to pay it. Employers pay it anyway but the govt want the employees to pay it too.

? just how many times can the same £ be taxed.

I had a look and found this petition.parliament.uk/petitions/591161 Dinahmo. I'll see if there is anything else.

To be honest I feel this cut was managed on the old against young basis so the "old" have stayed very quiet until now.

Just bumping this in case anyone wants to sign the petition.

Do petitions ever change anything that’s been decided? I signed the WASPI one.
Waste of time.

Thank you for offering your opinion Urmstongran. I wasn't asking you to sign only making the link available for those who may want to.

Whether petitions work or not, they're sometimes the only way to have our voices heard. So I've signed it.

I can't altogether agree with awarding the Triple Lock this year as every State Pensioner would get a very high % increase. As so many people of working age are not receiving even a 1% pay increase and their income tax is going to be increased for many years to pay for the past 18 months, it doesn't seem fair that we pensioners should get a large increase, which of course they pay for in their national insurance. There are many reasons why "Only 4 out of every 10 pensioners receive the new state pension of £9,350 a year." One of those reasons is like me, many pensioners are receiving the old state pension and have been doing since we turned 60 or if born in the 1950's up to 65 (people aged 66 at state pension age may be entitled to the NSP). Or again like me we get an occupational pension and were "contracted out" which meant we paid less national insurance and our occupational pension guaranteed that we received more than the basic state pension. "The average state pension of about £8,000 a year is around 24/25% of earnings." I would challenge this, are you saying that everyone who gets a State Pension of £8,000 a year was in a job that was at least £32,000 a year? I know that can't be right. Finally "2.1 million pensioners (of which 1.25 million are women) live in poverty – a level of poverty higher now than in 2012/13" I don't know if these figures are correct but of course there are many people struggling and our welfare system should help them. Personally I think the £10.00 Christmas Bonus for pensioners should be scrapped and everyone on pension credit should get more money. Also the Winter Fuel Allowance needs looking at. Do Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Stanley Johnson etc need it? Anyone who is of State Pension Age who is in the Higher Tax Bracket should not receive it, in my humble opinion.

I've just read that the government have been defeated on this in tonight's vote in the House of Lords. It now goes back to the House of Commons and ministers have been asked to re-address the matter. Fingers crossed now ?

Good news Spinnaker. The Lords presented a reasoned argument for it remaining. The idea that Therese Coffey backs (and all the other Tories, I presume) that it "would not be fair" is ridiculous. It isn't "fair" that we are so far behind other, similar countries, state pensions. The Triple Lock was supposed to change that.

Sadly, it still depends on this government caring about pensioners. Tory voters will, from what we read, always vote for them. They are more likely to blame those whose only or majority income comes from the State Pension than the government.

This is from the BBC:

Announcing the move in September, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said it would ensure pensioners did not "unfairly" benefit from a "statistical anomaly".

She argued that "would not be fair" during a period when the government had taken "difficult decisions" such as freezing public sector pay.

Under Lady Altmann's amendment, the government would have to continue to link pensions to an adjusted version of the official earnings figure. She has said this would be around 5%.

Ahead of the vote on her plan, she said the government's plan to suspend the triple lock would set a "seriously dangerous precedent".

"Pensioners are not a cash machine for chancellors to take money from when wanting to fund other projects or tax cuts elsewhere, especially not in the eye of a cost-of-living storm," she said.

"Yes, this is for one year only, but what a year to choose to do this, while older people are facing a cost of living crisis and the protection they rely on is being removed."

I would disagree that this is "for one year only". Once taken from us, it will affect us year after year, increasingly.

I think the whole pension scheme is a mess. I know it's a contributions-based scheme, but since no pensioner is expected to retire without any form of income whatsoever, do we really need all these different levels, top-ups, credits, allowances, Christmas bonuses? I mean, how much does it COST to administer all these?
Why not just pay a reasonable amount to all pensioners. And those, like me, who have an additional private pension can be taxed accordingly.
The £10 Christmas bonus is, apparently, going to cost the Treasury £175 million a year in the next 5 years (according to the DWP). Is this really the best way to spend this amount of money? Thinly spreading that amount of money - and giving it to those wealthy pensioners who really don't need it - seems ridiculous.
I know I'm over-simplifying the issue, but really - there must be a better way than all this convoluted, time-wasting, money-wasting system we have at present.

I couldn't agree with you more Dickens. No one would invent a system as complex as this from the start. It needs, as you say, turning on its head.

I feel it would be nearer to the Personal Income Tax Level of £12,570 if you were to pay enough to cover all the benefits that can be claimed in a year - with the exception of housing. Then, as you say, those with more income would pay tax (which also needs to be made more progressive, but that's another story).

The majority of those working in the DWP on the current system could then work on tracking down those not paying the correct taxes. A simple system would be a fairer system. There is the plus that Pensioners on lower incomes would spend most of it and help the economy.

Please, please could one of the parties offers this! If anyone knows of one that does could you let the rest of us know as they are currently hiding their light under a bushel.

Thank you for letting us know about the defeat in the HoL Spinnaker. I hadn’t seen that reported but I probably just missed it.
I do find this pitting of young against the old distasteful. Young people face challenges today, the older generation also faced challenges in it’s younger days, but what concerns me now is that over two million pensioners are living in poverty right now. We are facing high inflation and increased heating costs and these are the very pensioners who will be most affected. I think that the pension credit should be increased to give some immediate help to those who claim it, but that’s not going to fix the longer term problem of a country that so despises the people who have worked all their lives and paid into the system all their lives that they pay the lowest pension to those people in the whole of Europe, please correct me if I’m wrong about that. The state pension shouldn’t be set so low that two million of those pensioners need to claim a benefit, the pension credit. Thankfully many other pensioners managed to pay into a professional pension or private pension and therefore do not have to live on the basic pension. This is a situation that really annoys me, I think I’d better go and have a cup of tea and calm down.

Totally agree with your post Dickens.

And Pippa, I agree totally.

I think we may all need those cups of tea Maddy .

The worst about the pitting of young against the old is that it is simply not true that the young get anything out of this theft. The young will actually be worse off.

Because of the compounding of the growth that would have happened on the stolen amount, when the "young" come to start their Pensions they will get far less than they would have done. We will lose year by year but they will lose a compounded lump sum at the beginning and the growth they would have had on that amount all the way through.

They can't even do basic maths!

Well said, Maddyone.I believe the add ons were top ups to make up for the low pension rate.one of the lowest in Europe.

... thank you PippaZ - you're so right, no-one would choose this system to start from scratch... apart from all the administrative layers - think of all the paperwork and form filling that pensioners have to engage with. I think there's quite a few pensioners who don't do this stuff online either.

I know some individuals will insist that those who stayed at home looking after children etc who didn't 'pay in to the system' shouldn't be awarded the same amount as those who did work, but I would argue that in those days women were more or less expected to do exactly that. You could argue that raising the next generation of workers is also a job - albeit one we undertake voluntarily - and I cannot see a logical reason why such women should be penalised. As a tax-paying pensioner, I would have no problem with contributing so that all old people can have a fairly decent standard of living.
We're here on this earth for such a short time, relatively speaking - why do we not want to make life as simple as possible for the majority to enjoy, rather than condemn them to impoverishment and misery? Of course, that's a personal view and others will disagree, naturally.