The attack on the triple lock dresses a class conflict up as a dispute between generations.
The full new state pension is expected to rise by £488 next April, taking it to £250.70 a week, or £13,036.40 a year. The old basic pension is likely to rise by £374.40 to £192.10 a week, or £9,989.20 a year.
The increase follows average wage growth of 3.9 percent. Under the triple lock, pensions rise by earnings, inflation or 2.5 percent, whichever is highest. Labour promised to maintain the policy until 2029.
Cue another round of hand-wringing about “affordability” and “generational fairness”. A worker receiving £250.70 a week is once again being presented as a dangerous burden on society.
The annual figure sounds large when printed in a headline. Broken down into the money available to live on, it looks rather different.
The current Retirement Living Standards put the minimum annual spending needed by a single pensioner at £13,900 after tax. Even that modest standard assumes the person owns their home outright and has no rent or mortgage to pay. Against this benchmark, next April’s projected full pension would still be about £864 short. The old basic pension on its own would fall short by nearly £3,911, although some recipients also receive Additional State Pension or other support.
Not everyone receives the advertised full amount, either. Entitlement depends on a person’s National Insurance record, with those whose records began after April 2016 generally needing 35 qualifying years. Time spent out of formal employment, low-paid work and gaps in contributions can all reduce the amount.
There were 1.9 million pensioners living in relative poverty before housing costs in 2024–25, and 1.7 million after housing costs. The latter figure is flattered by the large number of pensioners who own their homes outright. Those still renting face a much harsher reality.
Despite this, Resolution Foundation chief executive Ruth Curtice called the triple lock “crazy”. She said it creates a “ratchet effect” where “pensioners’ living standards grow even faster than just a typical worker.”
“Pensioners have seen living standards grow three times more than typical workers over the last 20 years.”
Even if the average she cites is accurate, an average pensioner isn’t a class. The category includes retired cleaners living in rented flats, former professionals with generous occupational pensions, landlords and people sitting on substantial property and financial wealth. Their interests and living standards aren’t remotely identical.
Affluent pensioners aren’t affluent because the state gives them £250.70 a week. Their advantage comes mainly from property, private pensions and accumulated capital. Reducing the state pension would barely trouble the wealthiest, while bearing down directly on those with nothing else.
The “generational fairness” argument buries that class divide. Younger workers aren’t being impoverished by elderly workers receiving a basic income. They’re being impoverished by low wages, insecure employment, landlords, debt and the destruction of public services. Cutting somebody’s pension won’t raise another worker’s pay, reduce their rent or give them a secure job.
The latest labour-market figures underline the fraud. Unemployment remains at 4.9 percent, while vacancies and payroll employment have been falling. The same workers being told to resent pensioners are finding it harder to obtain secure employment and build pensions of their own.
Jonathan Cribb of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said: “Each increase in spending builds upon the last and so the long-run cost is substantial but very uncertain.”
Of course a permanent increase builds on the last one. So do interest payments, military budgets, subsidies to capital and every other continuing commitment of the state. Describing the pension bill as a frightening cash total settles nothing.
State pension spending is expected to reach £154bn this year, about 4.9 percent of national income. That’s a major use of society’s resources, but it’s hardly evidence of economic impossibility.
The British state pension operates mainly on a pay-as-you-go basis: current pensions are financed from present taxation and National Insurance contributions rather than individual pots stored away for decades. Retired people, like everyone not currently employed, consume part of the goods and services being produced now.
The real question is who controls that social product. Under capitalism, profits, rents and interest are treated as prior claims. What remains for workers — wages, services and pensions — is constantly put on trial.
The state pension is part of the social wage, won through generations of class struggle. It recognises, however inadequately, that workers retain a claim on society’s wealth after employers no longer purchase their labour. That’s precisely why capital regards it with hostility.
Britain’s fiscal debate is class politics dressed up as bookkeeping. A debt-interest bill forecast at £109bn for 2025–26 was treated as a binding obligation. Military spending associated with maintaining Britain’s position inside the imperialist alliance system is called a strategic necessity. Yet subsistence for retired workers always arrives with the question: can we really afford this?
An ageing population does create a real question about how current production is shared between workers, pensioners and other groups. Capital’s preferred answer is predictable: work longer, receive less and rely more heavily on private finance.
But private pensions reproduce the inequalities of working life. A contribution calculated as a percentage of a low wage remains small. Years spent in insecure jobs, unemployed, caring for relatives or unable to work don’t compound into a comfortable retirement.
The automatic-enrolment threshold remains £10,000 a year in each job. Employers generally don’t have to enrol workers earning less than that, even though these are precisely the workers least able to save independently.
This system carries the oppression of women directly into retirement. The Pensions Policy Institute estimates that women aged 55 to 59 possess only 54 percent of the pension wealth held by men. Women also make up 66 percent of workers earning below the automatic-enrolment threshold. Gendered working patterns and the pay gap account for much of the difference.
Women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid caring and domestic labour — the work that reproduces the labour force from one generation to the next. Capital benefits from this socially necessary labour being performed for free. The pension system then punishes women for having spent fewer years in paid employment. They pay twice: first through lost wages and career advancement opportunities, then through poverty in retirement.
Transmisogyny deepens the same process. A field experiment published in 2025 followed matched trans and cis applicants seeking entry-level work across 956 private-sector vacancies in engineering and social work. Within each field, the applicants were the same age, attended the same university, expected the same degree classification and had comparable education, skills and experience. They applied for the same jobs. The major difference visible to employers was that the trans women’s applications included their current names alongside the former names still appearing on official documents.
Cis men received interview invitations from 35.1 percent of applications and cis women from 31.3 percent. For trans women, the rate was just 10.4 percent. After controlling for application format, sending order and other variables, trans women remained 27.3 percent less likely than cis men to receive an interview. This wasn’t a difference produced by trans women choosing less promising occupations or possessing fewer qualifications. Employers were rejecting matched trans applicants before they even reached the interview room.
The penalty was particularly severe in engineering, where 89.2 percent of the workforce was male. Trans women applying in this sector had an 8.7 percentage point lower chance of receiving an interview than those applying in social work, where 80.6 percent of workers were women. Transmisogyny therefore doesn’t operate separately from the gendered division of labour. It helps police that division, marking male-dominated and comparatively well-paid work as territory from which trans women can be excluded.
Even the employers willing to interview trans women tended to consider them for worse-paid jobs. Vacancies producing interviews for trans women advertised average salaries of £23,555, compared with £28,800 for cis women and £29,193 for cis men. The trans applicants were being denied work more often and sorted towards jobs paying around a fifth less when they weren’t denied it.
Private pensions carry this discrimination forward across the rest of a trans woman’s life. Rejected applications mean longer periods without contributions. Lower wages mean smaller employee and employer payments. Lost contributions early in a career also lose decades of potential growth. The pension system records the eventual result as an individual’s failure to save, concealing the employers who restricted her access to work and devalued her labour before she’d even been given the chance to sell it.
The planned rise in the state pension age to 67 is no more class-neutral. Healthy life expectancy in England’s most deprived areas is only about 48 to 50 years, compared with roughly 69 years in the least deprived areas. Office for National Statistics A worker whose body has been worn down by manual labour, poverty or chronic illness reaches the same pension age on paper as somebody who spent a well-paid career in comfortable conditions. The state counts their birthdays while ignoring what class society has done to their bodies.
The projected pension will also sit £466.40 above the £12,570 personal allowance, creating an income-tax liability of roughly £90. The government says pensioners whose only income is the state pension won’t be made to pay these small amounts during this Parliament. Yet analysis by LCP suggests only one pensioner in 16 would benefit, because most have at least some additional taxable pension income.
That doesn’t mean they’re rich. A small workplace pension built over decades can amount to little more than another few pounds a week. As former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb put it, “The government’s plans to address this point are a mess,” said Sir Steve Webb.
The class line doesn’t run between generations. It runs through every generation. The worker paying contributions today and the pensioner receiving them tomorrow are often the same person at different points in life.
Capital wants both of them cheap: cheap labour while they can work, and a cheap retirement once they can’t. That is what lies behind the uproar over £250.70 a week.
