Rishi Sunak has pledged to stick to the pension triple lock despite signs that the guarantee to older people will cost the Treasury an extra £10bn next year - £2.5bn more than estimated in the spring budget.
The prime minister insisted he was comfortable with pensioners receiving the full annual uplift, which cost the taxpayer £124bn this year and is due to rise by a further 8% in April, according to the latest economic data.
"Of course the government is committed to its policy on the triple lock," Sunak told ITV, brushing aside concerns about the affordability of a scheme that was introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010.
Under the triple lock, pensions rise each April by whichever is highest of pay growth, inflation or 2.5%. A period of soaring inflation has caused the cost of the scheme to surge since 2022, causing the government's own spending watchdog to question its long-term viability.
Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, said pensioners had received two years of protection from the UK's cost of living crisis, benefiting from the triple lock last year when prices were rising faster than earnings and again this year thanks to earnings rising more quickly than prices. "That is what the triple lock is intended to achieve," he said.
Johnson said at some point the future of the guarantee would need to be addressed, but it was hard to see the government abandoning it in the run-up to an election. "Politically, that's extremely unlikely."
A breakdown of the result of the 2019 general election showed that support for the Conservatives increased steadily with age, with two-thirds of the over-70s backing Boris Johnson.
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