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.
But Bell said the public would prefer Burnham’s willingness to make an argument to what he claimed was the Conservatives’ failure to be honest.
“I think this is a bigger problem for Kemi Badenoch than she thinks. She thinks that her brand is principled, know what you think, tell it straight. And on this, she has done the opposite – we know that she knows it needs to change,” he said.
He cited the Conservative leader’s own suggestion, as recently as last year, that the triple lock should be means tested, and former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s claim that the policy was an “anchor drag” on the public finances.
“The triple lock kind of is the final nail in the coffin of the idea that there’s anything fiscally responsible about modern Conservatism,” Bell said.
Under Labour’s planned reforms, the state pension will rise each year by the highest of inflation, or 2.5%. It will only rise in line with earnings growth if its value has slipped behind recent wage growth.
Bell, the MP for Swansea West since 2024, was previously director of the Resolution Foundation thinktank. He retained his role as pensions minister – working between the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions – when Burnham came to power in July.
He said the prime minister’s 10-year plan, which may now be delayed until the new year, will include a promise of a better deal for future pensioners. “It’s just really important to be able to say to people, ‘the comfortable retirement that your parents had: we’re going to make sure that today’s private sector workers have got those’,” he added.
