Robert Colvile, Editor of CapX, wrote for the Telegraph Monday 1 May 2017 on the financial debate at the heart of this general election: save or spend.
Robert highlighted the triple lock on pensions as one area where politics and fiscal sense clash and referenced the Centre for Policy Studies report on the cost of the triple lock.
“Guaranteeing across-the-board pension increases at a time of austerity was always unfair. And it’s increasingly unaffordable: the difference between the triple lock, and pensions increasing in line with earnings, amounted to £7.4 billion in 2016-17 – the equivalent cost, as the Centre for Policy Studies pointed out, of 13 large state-of-the-art hospitals.
May’s apparent abandonment of the triple lock – promising on Marr that pensions will merely increase every year rather than being gold-plated as at present – is therefore sound common sense. Yet it has been presented, not least by the Labour Party, as an assault on the elderly. A temporary benefit born of cynical political calculation had become seen as a permanent entitlement, a birthright of every free-born pensioner that might as well have been enshrined in Magna Carta.”
Click here to read the full article.
Date Added: Monday 1st May 2017
