We all sort of know it, but no politician eally want to address is: the way we run state pensions won’t add up for much longer.
Poltically, raising the state pension age is a no-go zone, especially if you’re winning votes from people close to retirement. However, the more governments put off the tough calls, the harsher it’s going to feel when reality finally hits.
Britain is getting older. For decades, better healthcare, good food, and higher living standards have stretched life expectancy. At the same time, people are having fewer children, and not enough to maintain the population. This leaves a growing crowd of retirees and fewer workers covering the bills.
ATM, the state pension soaks up around 4.8% of the UK’s GDP, but if nothing changes, it could eat up nearly twice as much within fifty years, almost 10% of GDP. The official plan is to raise the state pension age to 68 by 2044. But the Office for Budget Responsibility calculates we'll need to do this way faster by 2037. That’s about 5.2 million people born between 1971 and 1977 who’d have to shift their retirement plans more than they expected.
NB I am caught up in that age bracket, my current projected retirement age is 67, but I'm already figuring it will be 68.
Nobody campaigns on making people work longer. Older are more likley to vote, and none of them want to hear about later retirement. So what do most governments do? They drip-feed small changes or just stall and hope someone else deals with it.
But the numbers don’t care about elections. Every year politicians delay, the shock gets worse later. If you introduce retirement age hikes slowly, people have time to adjust. If you wait until it’s urgent, people get blindsided.
And this isn’t just the UK’s headache. Most of Western Europe, Japan, and many other wealthier countries are in the same mess. Falling birth rates and longer lives are eating away at pension funds designed back when populations were younger and growing.
Politicans kid themselves that some sort of productivity boost will save us - more productivity means each worker can support more retirees—or so the theory goes.
But even if technology really delivers, it won’t magically erase the pension problem. It's unlikely to be enough to deal with the extra 5% of GDP pensions are set to soak up over the next 50 years.
Once again this is the case of our politicians avoiding the truth. Demographic change has been coming for years. This isn’t like a financial meltdown or a sudden disaster. We’ve known how many kids are being born, how long people live, and what this means for the workforce.
Every country will eventuall have to pick its own mix of solutions, but pretending we can keep going as we are is just wishful thinking.
The longer politicians duck this, the fewer choices the next generation gets. And that ends up costing all of us.
