The way I see it there are three realistic choices a country can make.
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Raise the pension age. Not very popular with the public as illustrated by protests everywhere this has been mentioned.
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Increased migration. Not very popular with the public as seen by the rise of far right parties in both Europe and outside.
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Lowered living standards. Not very popular because who wants to pay the same taxes but get less out of it?
This isn’t a UK problem. It’s the entire western world. And no, the populist idea of “just have more kids” doesn’t solve it.
Any ideas?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The retirement age will have to rise to 71 for middle-aged workers across the UK, according to research into the impact of growing life expectancy and falling birthrates on the state pension.
“But if you bring preventable ill health into the equation, that would have to increase even more,” added Mayhew, who is also professor of statistics at Bayes Business School and has advised the government on rises to the state pension age multiple times as a senior civil servant and in his current roles.
Jonathan Cribb, associate director and head of retirement at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that while he did not disagree with a higher pension age, increasing it without addressing other cost-saving measures was not “realistic or equitable”.
He added: “It would disproportionately impact poorer individuals whose ill-health means they have shorter lives, and so who receive pensions for less time.”
The Intergenerational Foundation, an independent thinktank, agreed that the pension age had to rise, but questioned on whose shoulders that cost should fall.
“Increasing the state pension age would be a terrible policy – a really bad way of attempting to make people more productive,” he said.
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