Keir Starmer has committed Labour to keeping the triple lock on the state pension. That’s the agreement, introduced by the coalition government in 2010, where the state pension goes up by whichever is the highest of three numbers: growth in earnings, inflation, or 2.5 per cent.

On the face of it, that should seem a reasonable thing to do. The real value of the basic state pension had fallen from 26 per cent of average full-time earnings in 1979 to around 16 per cent between 2000 and 2010. The triple lock, along with the new state pension, has restored payments to around 25 per cent of earnings. But, as a recent research from the House of Commons Library points out, there has been a lot of concern about the sustainability of the Government’s pension plans.

“Critics argue,” the Commons’ paper states, “that the triple lock is unfair because older adults currently experience higher standards of living than younger people may expect to enjoy in the future, and that it is unfair to expect younger people to subsidise older people’s incomes so much through the triple lock”.

Indeed. The Office for Budget Responsibility has noted the ratchet effect whereby any one of the three variables pushes up the costs on a permanent basis. The Institute for Fiscal Studies is against it, with its deputy director Carl Emmerson arguing that “pensioners deserve better than the triple lock”.

On the other hand, supporters point out that the UK state pension is still low compared with most advanced economies and the triple lock particularly helps people on lower incomes. Pensioners can reasonably argue that they paid national insurance for many years on the promise that this was going towards their future pensions, and that they are simply getting back what they paid for.

There is, of course, something else: the massed ranks of older voters. There are more than 10 million people over the age of 65 in the UK now and that number is set to grow steadily over the next 40 years to around 16 million. Put bluntly, young workers may have to pay the taxes, but it’s the oldies who have........

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