𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Britain’s ageing population crisis is being treated as a dreadful new discovery into which we have only just stumbled. In reality, it is one of the most predictable demographic trends of the past half-century, and the political failure to prepare for it is nothing short of irresponsible.

The House of Lords is right to warn that the UK is “strikingly underprepared” for an ageing society. One does have to question why it took them so long to figure this out. But the real scandal is not simply that we are living longer or having fewer children. It is that successive governments have spent years knowing what was around the corner, and choosing to do nothing about it.

Now the cheque has been slapped down, and once again the answers from Whitehall appear to be the usual mix of lazy, unimaginative dross most of us now expect as the norm from the corridors of power: work longer, pay more, and expect less.

Raising the state pension age is wheeled out time and time again as the grown-up solution, despite overwhelming evidence that it simply does not work. Already, the state pension is proving to be an outdated concept, a one-size-fits-all solution that treats those on gold-plated final-salary pensions the same as pensioners on the poverty line.

It is a matter of simple arithmetic that such unfairness must be ironed out if the system is to survive. Many people are already out of the workforce by their late fifties anyway, not due to laziness, but because of ill-health, caring responsibilities, financial planning or jobs that wear the body down. Do we really expect a care worker, a bricklayer, or a soldier to work until they’re 67?

Nor is mass immigration the silver bullet it is so often presented as. Even the Lords (many of whom cash in a state pension alongside their £300+ a day fee for simply turning up, by the way), acknowledge that it cannot fix the problem. Independent studies, including those by Migration Watch, have repeatedly shown that in many cases immigration can cost the Exchequer more than it contributes once public services, housing and welfare are factored in.

Importing people to pay for a bloated state simply kicks the can down the road and often serves only to exacerbate the pressures.

The truth is perhaps a little uncomfortable. For decades, Britain has built an economic model that actively punishes younger workers, then expresses horror that they cannot save, have children, or prepare for their eventual retirement.

Earnings have been stagnating for years, with high taxes, weak growth and a regulatory culture that is nothing short of hostile to enterprise. House prices have been allowed to spiral out of control, locking millions out of the prospect of ownership that previous generations enjoyed and forcing them to pour vast chunks of their income into rent instead of savings. Student loans now function less like education funding and more like a graduate tax, with interest rates that would make a loan shark blush.

And then we are told that today’s young workers must simply “save more” and “work longer”.

How, exactly?

In the 1990s, a typical home cost around four times average earnings. Today, in large parts of the country, especially London and the South East (where much of the work is) it is closer to ten or twelve times. Older generations bought cheaply, paid off their mortgages early and enjoyed decades of rising wages and free or near-free higher education. Many now benefit from generous public sector pensions and a triple-locked state pension that younger workers will almost certainly never receive.

This is not an argument against pensioners. It is an argument against a political system that refuses to acknowledge basic arithmetic.

An ageing society does not require a bigger, heavier state. It requires a leaner one. One that stops hoovering up the productive capacity of younger people and starts empowering them to earn more, keep more and invest for their own futures.

That means cutting taxes on work, slashing barriers to business growth, reforming the planning system to bring down housing costs, and ending the tacit assumption that the under-40s exist primarily to fund promises made decades ago, the benefits of which they will never see.

It also means honesty. We cannot pretend that ever-higher spending is sustainable when the dependency ratio is soaring and the workforce is shrinking. Nor can we continue to delay reform and hope the numbers somehow stop adding up.

The House of Lords report is right about one thing above all: this crisis has been ignored for far too long. But the answer is not to tell everyone they will work until they are dead.

If Rachel Reeves and her successors continue down that road, they will not only fail pensioners. They will fail and the entire generation that has already been asked to pay the price for political cowardice, and is rapidly running out of patience (and money).