Tories would have to raise state pension age above 70 to keep triple lock, says minister

Tories would have to raise state pension age above 70 to keep triple lock, says minister Kemi Badenoch attacked reforms but is not being clear about how party would meet costs, Torsten Bell claims

Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives would have to raise the state pension age above 70 to meet the cost of keeping the triple lock, Treasury minister Torsten Bell has claimed.

Labour has announced reforms to the triple-lock promise to come into force in the next parliament – with the initial proceeds earmarked for Andy Burnham’s national care service.

The Conservatives have attacked the move, and insisted they would stick with the triple lock, which increases the state pension each year in line with the largest of inflation, 2.5% or earnings growth.

However, Bell argued that with the costs of an unreformed triple lock increasing over time – to £50bn by 2050, according to government estimates – a Tory government would end up repeating the approach they took in the 2010s and speeding up planned increases to the state pension age.

“If you don’t want to have an adjustment to the triple lock, then you will need to do other things to make the state pension remotely sustainable,” he said. “We don’t need to guess what they would do because they’ve literally just done it, which is they repeatedly and at very short notice accelerated the increases in the state pension age.

“They did that in the in 2011 and in 2014. Some people had as little as five years’ notice.”

In 2013, the then chancellor, George Osborne, described increasing the pension age as, “one of the less controversial things we have done,” which had nevertheless delivered “absolutely enormous savings”.

The state pension age, now under review, is already expected to increase to 68 between 2044 and 2046; but Bell claimed the Conservatives would end up going further.

“All I’m saying is, Conservatives do raise the state pension age aggressively, and they have,” he said. “And even though they know that the triple lock should change, they are opposing it – and the consequence of that is they would end up making people wait into their 70s.”

The triple lock had previously been seen as too politically risky to reform, particularly in the light of the backlash against Labour’s plan to remove the winter fuel allowance from the vast majority of pensioners – which was subsequently abandoned .