One in four pensioners is now worth more than £1m

MORE than three million pensioners are now millionaires as a result of ballooning retirement wealth over the past decade, figures have shown.

One in four people over the age of 65 lives in households with property and pension wealth worth more than £1 million, according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics data by the Intergenerational Foundation.

The number of silver millionaires has nearly quadrupled over the past decade to reach 3.1million in 2020. More than half now live in households with more than £500,000 in assets, up from 25 per cent in 2008.

This sharp rise has sparked criticism over the planned universal boost in the state pension next year. The benefit is on track to rise in line with double-digit inflation next April, increasing by nearly £1,000 a year.

However, this comes after the Government demanded that workers accept a real terms pay cut. The state pension “triple lock” policy means it rises every April, either by the previous September’s inflation number, the average growth in wages or 2.5 per cent – whichever is higher. Inflation is predicted to hit 10 per cent this autumn.

The Intergenerational Foundation said the number of wealthy pensioners raises questions over the Government’s decision to maintain the policy. It called it an “unfair” use of taxpayers’ money. Angus Hanton, of the charity, said the number of millionaire pensioners also laid bare how the wealth divide had opened up between generations.

He said: “After a decade of aboveinflation increases in the state pension, thanks to the triple lock, this analysis raises the question as to whether a potential 10 per cent increase is the fairest way to deal with poverty.”

However, Baroness Altmann, a former pensions minister, said many pensioners are asset rich but cash poor and will be heavily reliant on the bumper state pension rise next April to get by.

“It is outrageous to suggest that just because some pensioners live in a house that has risen in value, they are very wealthy. Property prices [do not] help them to live,” she said.

One pensioner in four is now a “millionaire”, and some campaigners insist that they shouldn’t receive so much of an increase in state pensions next year. This ignores the meaning of millionaire. “I’d like a plain simple car, a cerise Cadillac,” Eartha Kitt used to sing, “Long enough to have a bowling alley in the back.” An old-fashioned millionaire is nothing like someone on a fixed or declining income whose house is worth £1million on paper. How can a householder benefit from that unless she decides to sleep in the street? No, there is no cachet in being a millionaire. (In parenthesis, we’ll surely never again hear broadcast the duet from the film The Millionairess by Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers as an Indian doctor. But that is for other reasons.) Still, pensioners deserve respect, not caricature as gilded drones or needy beggars.