UK state pension age rise to 70 warning over triple lock, Digi Mart USA News (United Kingdom): The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) state pension age would have to rise to 70 if the Conservatives kept the triple lock, according to a warning from the government. The Conservative Party has pledged to keep the metric, while the Labour Party government has committed to adjusting it from 2030.
The opposition’s plans, if it wins the next general election in 2030, have prompted the warning. Treasury minister Torsten Bell claimed that the costs of an unreformed triple lock increasing over time would mean speeding up planned increases to the state pension age.
“If you don’t want to have an adjustment to the triple lock, then you will need to do other things to make the state pension remotely sustainable,” he said.
Bell said there was no need to guess what the Conservatives would do, pointing to their record. “They repeatedly and at very short notice accelerated the increases in the state pension age.
They did that in 2011 and in 2014. Some people had as little as five years’ notice.”
“All I’m saying is, Conservatives do raise the state pension age aggressively, and they have,” he said. “And even though they know that the triple lock should change, they are opposing it – and the consequence of that is they would end up making people wait into their 70s.”
Bell said the issue posed a bigger problem for Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch than she realized. “She thinks that her brand is principled, know what you think, tell it straight.
And on this, she has done the opposite – we know that she knows it needs to change,” he said.
“The triple lock kind of is the final nail in the coffin of the idea that there’s anything fiscally responsible about modern Conservatism,” Bell said. “It’s just really important to be able to say to people, ‘the comfortable retirement that your parents had: we’re going to make sure that today’s private sector workers have got those,’ he added.
