Retirement: only for the rich?

“Pensions? Just don’t go there.” Truth is, many of us prefer not to think about how we’re going to fund our lives in retirement – and there’s a reason for that, said Iain Macwhirter in The Herald (Glasgow): the figures are simply too frightening. Consider this: if you want to buy a pension delivering a modest £20,000 a year, index-linked, you’ll need to have saved well over £600,000 at present annuity rates. “That’s more than someone on average earnings of £26,000 earns in 20 years – all of it.” Now, to make our prospects yet more bleak, the Government has announced that it’s raising the state pension age earlier than planned. The upshot is that if you are 47 or younger, you won’t even get your far-from-easeful £155 per week from the state (assuming that you’ve made 35 years of solid NI contributions) until you are 68. The change (which could yet be blocked in Parliament) is expected to save the Government £74bn over the years up to 2045-46.

There’s a problem with pensions, said Jane Parry on The Conversation. The state system was set up to serve “a very different demographic, with a much shorter expected period of retirement”. People aged 65 today can expect to live about 20 years, on average, in retirement; up from 12 in 1940. To make sure future generations can have a good quality of life well into their 80s is a “serious challenge” for any government; one that is complicated by the myriad ways in which the world of work is changing. The idea that people will stay in one career, let alone one job, for life is fast becoming outdated; and such is the pace of change, it’s not clear what kinds of jobs we might be doing in a few years, let alone decades. Nor is there any certainty that we’ll be able to work until we’re 68, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Which is why the rise in the pension age is worrying even for the lucky few of us who have cushy jobs that we’d love to keep doing. Assuming we’re still in good health, and automation and new technologies haven’t swept away our roles, who will want to hire us when we’re 62? As for manual workers, exhausted by decades of labour, they may not be physically capable of doing their jobs into their late-60s.

We should be doing more, sooner, to address the issue, which is only going to be made worse by restricting immigration, said Nick Cohen in The Observer. Today’s pensioners are enjoying unparalleled prosperity. But as Theresa May learned to her cost when she tried to tackle the social care crisis and tinker with the triple lock on pensions, the baby boomers won’t forgo their privileges without a fight – and they have serious political clout. “They cannot be made to pay, so their children must suffer instead.”