Pensionärernas villkor

Den svenska pensionsreformen är internationellt beundrad därför att den är ett unikt exempel på hur en bred politisk opinion enats om en hållbar ordning. Denna ordning är nu utsatt för mer tryck än någonsin.

Det finns rader av aspekter på frågan om pensionärernas villkor.

Här en text från den brittiska debatten:

Pensioners as a group have stopped being poor. Or rather we have moved from a world only 30 years ago in which pensioners were much more likely to be poor than their younger counterparts to one in which they are less likely to be poor. In 2011, for the first time, the average incomes of pensioner households, adjusted for housing costs and the costs of children, rose above the average incomes of the rest of the population. Recent work by my colleagues at the IFS suggests that most people retiring now will be better off in retirement than they were on average over their working lives.

This is probably the greatest triumph of social policy during my lifetime. But understanding and policy decisions often lag behind facts such as these. The continuing “triple lock” on state pensions, so that they rise by whichever is the fastest of prices, earnings or 2.5 per cent, and the continued protection of benefits such as the winter fuel allowance, must be seen in this context.

One problem is that once something is established in public policy, perhaps for very good reasons, it can be hard to change. This is true of rather small things such as the winter fuel allowance which, for all the publicity associated with it, costs only £2 billion. It is also true for much bigger things.

Here are just three examples:

• Gross spending on pensions for former public sector employees will approach £36 billion this year. Despite some reforms, these pensions, and those being accrued by current public sector workers, are hugely more generous than almost anything in the private sector.
• No national insurance contributions are made when private pensions are paid out, nor were they paid on most contributions into pension schemes, a hugely generous tax break that costs billions. Decades of cutting income tax rates and increasing rates of national insurance contributions have, probably inadvertently, benefited pensioners at the expense of workers.
• In the past 50 years male life expectancy at 65 has risen by nearly ten years. The state pension age has not changed at all. In that context plans to raise it by a couple of years by the mid-2020s don’t look so radical.

We may decide we do not want to change these things — but we do need to be aware of the costs of not doing so.

Detta är en text hämtad från The Times. Författare är Paul Johnson, chef för Institute for Fiscal Studies.