Bell says keeping triple lock could push Tory pension age above 70

Treasury minister Torsten Bell has claimed that Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives would have to raise the state pension age above 70 to afford keeping the triple lock. His intervention, reported by the Guardian, challenges the opposition to explain how it would finance the pension guarantee while rejecting Labour’s planned changes.

Labour has announced reforms for the next parliament, with the initial proceeds earmarked for Andy Burnham’s national care service. Badenoch has attacked the proposals, but Bell argues that her party has not been clear about the costs of maintaining the existing arrangement or how those costs would be met.

The triple lock determines annual increases in the basic and new state pensions, rather than the age at which people become eligible to receive them. Under the existing formula, payments rise by whichever is highest: average earnings growth, consumer price inflation or 2.5%, according to the House of Commons Library.

Those two policy choices affect retirement in different ways. Changing the uprating formula alters how pension payments grow over time, while increasing the eligibility age makes people wait longer before receiving them. Bell’s warning links the cost of preserving one protection to the possibility of changing the other.

His claim should not be read as an announced Conservative commitment to a pension age above 70. It is a minister’s assessment of the consequences of retaining the triple lock, and the material supplied does not establish that such an increase is the only available way to finance it.

The Department for Work and Pensions says the government will retain the current triple lock throughout this parliament before introducing an adjusted mechanism from April 2030. Under that approach, annual increases would still have a floor of inflation or 2.5%, with additional increases where necessary to maintain the pension’s value relative to earnings.

The department’s analysis estimates that the adjusted system would reduce annual spending by £50 billion in nominal terms in 2049–50 compared with retaining the existing formula. In 2025–26 prices, the estimated saving is £30 billion. These figures describe the difference between two projected spending paths, not a reduction in today’s pension payments.

The government analysis also stresses that long-term estimates depend on assumptions about earnings, inflation, demographic changes and pension entitlements. It describes the results as indications of direction and scale rather than certain outcomes, an important qualification when assessing claims about what future governments would have to do.

Separately, the legislated timetable provides for the state pension age to rise to 68 between 2044 and 2046, according to official pension-age review material. Bell’s warning therefore concerns a substantially higher threshold than that timetable, rather than an increase already set out in law.

The immediate political dispute is over who should bear the cost of retirement protection and how savings should be used. As Labour moves towards its planned changes, the central questions remain how the revised guarantee will operate and what funding alternative the Conservatives will put forward.