The UK’s pension triple lock has done its job and needs to be retired
The UK’s pension triple lock has only been in place for 15 years. But it’s done the job it was brought in to do, and now it should be scrapped. So the prime minister is right to want to change it. Because while it’s been widely treated as politically untouchable, the triple lock is very expensive. That’s not to say it was unnecessary. At the time that it was introduced in 2011 (by the Conservative-led coalition) to address the problem of pensioner poverty, the state pension was equivalent to only a sixth of national average earnings. To reverse the decline of the pension relative to earnings, the triple lock mechanism meant that every year, state pensions would rise by whichever is the greatest of three measures: 2.5%, the rate of price inflation, or average earnings growth. The overall idea was to reduce poverty and ensure that pensioners benefited from rising prosperity, if and when the economy grew. Individually, those measures were introduced for slightly different reasons. Increasing state pensions in line with price inflation for …
