{"id":18964,"date":"2026-04-21T18:15:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T18:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/18964\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T18:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T18:15:19","slug":"dont-blame-the-triple-lock-for-britain-going-broke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/18964\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t blame the triple lock for Britain going broke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even worse, in the wake of the pandemic, relying on welfare has been normalised. We have witnessed staggering increases in the number of claimants, as well as in the numbers of people withdrawing from the workforce completely. Disability and health benefits account for more than half the projected increase in welfare spending over the rest of this decade, Universal Credit<\/a> for another 20 per cent, and scrapping the two-child benefit cap, by itself for another 4 per cent.<\/p>\n

All those costs are rising far faster than the state pension, and at an accelerating pace as more and more people decide it makes more sense to get by on benefits than to try to support themselves in a collapsing jobs market. Just as seriously, we borrowed the money to pay for Covid when it was cheap. Interest rates have risen significantly since then. Indeed, the annual interest bill on the extra debt we took on \u2013 assuming \u00a3350bn as the final cost \u2013 is more than \u00a317bn a year or a sixth of the annual cost of the state pension<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is very hard to cut the sums spent on the state pension without causing genuine hardship. Not many 70-somethings can go back to full-time employment even if they wanted to. True, we can\u2019t go back and recover the money we spent on Covid now, nor can we easily bring down all the extra debt we took on to deal with the pandemic. But we can tackle the legacy of state support it has left behind. It is hard to understand, for example, why ADHD diagnoses are rising<\/a> by close to 20 per cent a year, or why more than half a million people are now claiming \u201cpersonal independence payments\u201d for \u201cmood disorders\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sure, there are criticisms of the triple lock. A double lock, covering earnings and inflation, or even even a single lock, linking the state pension to average earnings, might be a lot better. But let\u2019s not kid ourselves. The real task is to get the economy growing again, to control public spending so that borrowing costs<\/a> come down, and most of all to break the cycle of welfare dependency that keeps pushing up the half of the welfare bill that is not accounted for by pensioners. If we could do all that, the triple lock would be perfectly affordable \u2013 the only problem is there is very little sign of it actually happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even worse, in the wake of the pandemic, relying on welfare has been normalised. We have witnessed staggering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,1183,5835,31,8701,18,8700,613,14,182,1121,431],"class_list":{"0":"post-18964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-comment","10":"tag-hm-treasury","11":"tag-labour-party","12":"tag-matthew-lynn","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-office-for-budget-responsibility","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-rachel-reeves","18":"tag-state-pension","19":"tag-uk-economy"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116444065098806859","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}