The full new state pension is at present £241.30 a week. I have collected mine for seven years, and a fair part of it has gone on tobacco and on the strong drink I carry home from Sainsbury. It is not a princely sum, and a man with nothing else would need to think carefully before he turned on the heating. On Tuesday, 29 September, at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, the Prime Minister announced that from 2030 it is to grow more slowly than the law at present requires. He called this “a good deal”, and I have been long enough in practice to know what follows when the other side describes its own offer in those words.

As most of our readers are American, I had better explain again what is being taken away. Since 2011, the state pension has risen every April in line with average earnings or with prices, whichever has grown faster, and in any case by not less than 2.5 per cent. This is the triple lock. It was brought in by the Coalition after three decades in which the pension had been tied to prices alone, and the effect of that earlier policy is on record. The link with earnings was cut in 1980, and the pension fell from 26 per cent of average earnings in 1979 to 16 per cent before the lock began its work. Anyone who doubts what a pension tied to prices can do should recall April 2000, when Gordon Brown raised it by seventy-five pence a week. It has since recovered to about 30 per cent of median full-time pay, and this recovery is what ministers have in mind when they hint that the old have been spoiled.

Mr Burnham has been Prime Minister since 20 July, having reached the office through a ballot of his party and without troubling the electorate. He proposes what his people call an “adjusted triple lock”. From April 2030, the pension will rise each year by prices or by 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher. It will no longer follow earnings from year to year. Earnings are to count only if the pension is judged to have fallen behind them “over time”, when some correction is promised. Until then the present arrangement stands, because the manifesto of 2024 promised it for the whole of this Parliament, and the change will go into the next manifesto beside proportional representation and whatever else has occurred to the party by 2029. The money saved is to help pay for a National Care Service, free at the point of use, which is also not to open in full until the next Parliament. “I accept I may pay a political price,” he told the conference. “But someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off.” I observe, with the pedantry of my profession, that the plaster is on somebody else.

One detail of the scheme has had less notice than it deserves. Of the three limbs of the triple lock, only one rests on an Act of Parliament. Section 150A of the Social Security Administration Act 1992 requires the Secretary of State to review the pension each year against the general level of earnings, and to lay an order raising it by not less than the percentage by which earnings have grown. The promises about prices and about 2.5 per cent are political undertakings laid on top of the statute, and they have the same legal force as the manifesto of 2024. As I read the announcement, Mr Burnham therefore means to repeal the one part of the lock to which a minister can be held, and to leave standing the two parts that depend on a minister’s word. Nobody has yet said who will decide that the pension has fallen behind, or what measure he will use. A duty is to give way to a discretion, and it is the general experience of mankind that a discretion vested in a department is exercised in favour of the department.

We have been here before. The Conservatives promised the triple lock in their manifesto of 2019. In 2021, they passed the Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Act to set the earnings link aside for a year, on the ground that the figures had been distorted by the lockdowns. Pensioners duly received 3.1 per cent in April 2022, a month in which prices were rising at 9 per cent. The suspension was described at the time as temporary and exceptional, which is how every permanent change in this country is first described.

I turn to the costings. The state pension will cost about £154 billion this year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Downing Street claims that the adjustment will save £15 billion a year by the end of the 2030s, and has not shown its working. The Office for Budget Responsibility finds no significant saving before 2034, and by 2040 a saving of about 0.2 per cent of national income, or £6 billion a year in today’s money. Against this, the Health Foundation puts the cost of a comprehensive universal care service at about £18.5 billion a year by 2036. Jonathan Cribb of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a body that welcomes the change, says that it “will not be the answer to funding universal social care”, and Mr Burnham is reported to have accepted that higher taxes will probably be needed as well. The pensioners are to surrender a statutory protection from 2030 in return for a service that has neither adequate funding nor an opening date.

Let us be generous, though, and take the larger figure. Total public spending in 2025-26 was £1,360 billion, or rather more than 44 per cent of national income. Fifteen billion is about one pound in every ninety of that. The six billion allowed by the Office for Budget Responsibility is nearer one pound in every two hundred and twenty-five. Since I am comparing a saving promised for 2040 with the spending of last year, even these fractions flatter the Government. We are asked to believe that a State of this size cannot remain solvent unless it shaves the increases on £241.30 a week.

Consider what the same State finds that it can afford. The National Audit Office puts the cost of the asylum system at about £4.9 billion in 2024-25. The contracts for housing asylum seekers were let in 2019 to three companies at an expected cost of £4.5 billion over ten years. They are now expected to cost £15.3 billion, and the contractors report an average profit margin of 7 per cent on that happy miscalculation. Figures said to have been obtained from the Department for Work and Pensions under the Freedom of Information Act, and reported in the press last month, show £11.9 billion of Universal Credit paid in 2025 to households containing at least one foreign national, against £7.5 billion two years earlier. I concede that these households include British spouses and children, and that the official count of foreign claimants has lately been falling as a share of the whole. Even so, the growth in that one payment over two years amounts to about three quarters of everything the Office for Budget Responsibility expects the pensioners to give up.

Then there are our own people. Health and disability benefits cost £83.4 billion in 2025-26, and the Office for Budget Responsibility expects them to reach £99.6 billion by 2028-29. I do not say that every claimant is a malingerer, and many are no doubt as ill as they say. But nobody who walks through an English town on a weekday afternoon will believe that the nation’s health is failing at the rate these figures imply. The increase alone is £16 billion in three years. That is more than the saving Downing Street claims from the pensioners, and it is nearly three times the saving the official forecasters will allow.

Those are the scroungers at the bottom, foreign and native. The ones at the top are better dressed and a good deal more expensive. Debt interest came to £109 billion in 2025-26, paid to the banks and investment funds that lent the money earlier governments wasted. The Bank of England’s losses on the gilts it bought with newly created money are indemnified by the Treasury, and the lifetime net loss is put by the Office for Budget Responsibility, on the figure cited last month by the New Economics Foundation, at £164 billion. Much of that passes as interest to the commercial banks on reserves that were conjured into being for their benefit. Those of us who said at the time that quantitative easing was a subsidy to the owners of assets were told that we did not understand modern money. We understand the bill well enough.

The largest call of all is the military budget. Defence spending is planned to rise from £62 billion in 2025-26 to £79 billion in 2029-30. The Government is committed to 3.5 per cent of national income by 2035, a target for which Mr Streeting, the new Defence Secretary, is reported to have offered a “cast iron guarantee”, and the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated the extra cost at £40 billion a year in the prices of 2025-26. To this may be added £3 billion a year in military aid to Ukraine, promised until at least 2030-31. “We are going to honour our commitments on defence,” Mr Burnham said in his first week, “and use that investment to transform people’s lives.” I do not doubt that lives will be transformed, though the verb covers a wide range of outcomes.

Here I must separate what I can prove from what I infer. Mr Burnham says that the pension saving is for care, and he has declined in the Commons to pay for rearmament by cutting the benefits bill. I have seen no document that assigns the pensioners’ money to the Army. But there is no hypothecation in British public finance. Whatever is not paid out under one head is available under every other, and a prudent creditor judges a debtor by noticing which of his obligations he treats as binding. The military commitment comes with a date and a guarantee. The care service comes with a costing that its own admirers say will not work. When one promise is funded and the other is not, I infer that the first is the policy and the second is its wrapping paper. The inference is mine, and the reader may weigh it for himself.

Someone told me the other day that none of this will ever happen, because the voters will object. He had some evidence on his side. The general secretary of Unite calls the plan “electoral suicide”, and Mr Farage says it is “launching an offensive against our elderly”. There must be an election by the summer of 2029, and the old turn out to vote more reliably than anyone else. My acquaintance concludes that the scheme will be dropped, or that Labour will be thrown out and its successors will keep the lock.

This brings us, however, to the nature of democracy. It is not a matter of waiting for the people to vote and then for a new government to do what the voters have mandated it to do. Democracy is important to the politicians, because elections decide which team will be allowed to take the bribes for the next four or five years. Actual policy is decided elsewhere, and the politicians are ultimately responsible to those who decide the policy. No doubt, elections are occasionally regarded as a consultative opinion poll, and the people are allowed something of what they ask for, though only if this does not conflict with one of the core policies of the ruling class. Elected politicians are allowed some day-to-day control over minor decisions. But that is the limit of democracy as we enjoy it in modern Britain.

The history of the triple lock is a fair test of this account. Labour promised to keep it in 2024 and now announces its end. The Conservatives promised it in 2019 and suspended it in 2021. Mrs Badenoch, who has now ruled out any change, was musing early last year about means tests. Reform is loud in defence of the old, and I shall believe in its indignation when one of its ministers has sat through his first meeting with the Treasury. Meanwhile, the policy itself was written long before a politician was found to read it out. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation have called for years for the lock to be “reformed”, and the Office for Budget Responsibility lists it among the causes of fiscal unsustainability. The Tony Blair Institute went further earlier this year, with a scheme for the state pension that I reviewed in these pages. A change that every permanent institution wants, and that each party resists only while in opposition, is not going to be stopped by an election.

Nor is the promised consultation worth much on its own terms. Labour argues that the public will have its say, because the change will not be made until it has been put in a manifesto. A general election is not a referendum on a clause. The voter is handed a bound volume and may not strike out a page, and if he votes Labour for the care service or for a new electoral system, he will be told afterwards that he gave a mandate for everything else between the covers. It is fitting that the same speech promised proportional representation. The method of choosing the team may be altered as often as anyone likes, so long as the team’s instructions stay the same.

The ruling class has decided that the old are to be plundered – the old among others – to fund a big expansion of the armed forces, and then a big war. That is what will happen. This breach of the triple lock will not be the last, and it already has company: the pension age is rising from 66 to 67 between this year and 2028, and the personal allowance for income tax has been frozen for so long that the full pension is about to overtake it. I have collected my pension now for seven years. I plan to live somewhat longer than I have so far. I do not know if I shall. One thing I do know, however, is that, if I do live longer, that pension will be increasingly worthless. The £241.30 will go on arriving, raised each year by an official measure of prices that has never yet agreed with my bill at Sainsbury, and I rejoice that I, unlike millions of others, have other means of support. That is, I shall have other means of support until those too are taken away.

Sources

Heather Stewart and Hilary Osborne, “Will pensioners be poorer as a result of Burnham scrapping the triple lock?”, The Guardian, 29 September 2026.

“Andy Burnham sets out plans to end triple lock from 2030 to pay for social care”, ITV News, 29 September 2026: https://www.itv.com/news/2026-09-29/andy-burnham-social-care-nhs-triple-lock-pensions

“Could changing the pension triple lock pay for Burnham’s big social care plan?”, BBC News, September 2026 (Downing Street, Office for Budget Responsibility and Health Foundation figures): https://www.aol.com/articles/could-changing-pension-triple-lock-195905000.html

Social Security Administration Act 1992, section 150A: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/5/section/150A

House of Lords Library, “UK fiscal outlook: September 2026” (total spending, debt interest): https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-fiscal-outlook/

National Audit Office, “An analysis of the asylum system”, 10 December 2025; “Home Office’s asylum accommodation contracts”, 7 May 2025: https://www.nao.org.uk/

Full Fact on Universal Credit and foreign nationals: https://fullfact.org/immigration/what-proportion-of-universal-credit-goes-to-non-british-citizens/ — the £11.9 billion figure is as reported in the press in September 2026 from a Freedom of Information response.

Full Fact on health and disability benefits (Office for Budget Responsibility figures): https://fullfact.org/economy/tony-blair-disability-benefits-defence-spending/

House of Commons Library, “UK defence spending”, CBP-8175, 22 July 2026: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8175/CBP-8175.pdf

“UK Prime Minister Burnham signals higher defence spending”, The National, 22 July 2026: https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/uk/2026/07/22/uk-prime-minister-burnham-signals-higher-defence-spending/

New Economics Foundation, “How the Bank of England has wasted billions”, September 2026: https://neweconomics.org/2026/09/how-the-bank-of-england-has-wasted-billions-and-why-australia-shows-the-way-forward