Theme: Public Policy | Content Type: Journal article

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Unlocking the Pensions Debate: The Origins and Future of the ‘Triple Lock’

Jonathan Portes

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Andre Taissin

| 1 min read

The ‘triple lock’ mechanism governing the uprating of state pensions is often framed as a transfer from workers to mostly well-off pensioners, driven by the latter's outsize political influence. Others note that pensioner poverty remains widespread and that the UK state pension remains relatively low compared to other advanced economies. Both perspectives—but especially the first—often omit the historical context and, particularly, the post-1979 steady fall in the value of the state pension as a proportion of earnings and the resulting increasing dependence on means-tested benefits. The key insight of the Turner report was that failure to reverse this trend would further erode any incentive to save for lower- and middle-income earners. Reforms that solely focus on the short-term impacts on current pensioners, rich and poor, risk long-term damage.

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    Jonathan Portes

    Jonathan Portes is Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Department of Political Economy, King's College London.

    Articles by Jonathan Portes
Volume 96, Issue 3

Latest Journal Issue

Volume 96, Issue 3

This issue features a collection titled 'The Intellectual and Political Legacy of David Marquand', who died in April 2024, edited by Colin Crouch, Ben Jackson and Peter Sloman. In this collection, authors including Jean Seaton, Will Hutton and Hilary Wainwright consider Marquand's legacy as a great progressive thinker, his biography of Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister, and the role of socialism for Marquand. Other articles include a commentary by Deborah Mabbett titled 'Welfare reform by numbers'; Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams on 'The Vices of Values: Matthew Goodwin and the Politics of Motivation'; Helen McCarthy on 'Why the WASPI has no Sting: Gender, Generation and Pension Inequalities'; and Sam Taylor Hill, Tariq Modood and John Denham on 'Multicultural Nationalism: Saving the White Working Class from Blue Labour?' A selection of book reviews feature Edmund Fawcett's review of 'Nationalism: A World History' by Eric Storm and Samuel Cohn's review of 'Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid' by Sheilagh Ogilvie.

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