Axing triple lock would be plain bonkers - it's austerity on steroids

The triple lock is under concerted attack, and the calls are becoming increasingly desperate and shrill. Unelected and unaccountable think tanks are leading the campaign because elected politicians know that it would be political suicide to advocate increases in pensioner poverty.

The latest plan from the anti-pensioner Policy Exchange is plain bonkers, amounting to austerity on steroids. This organisation proposes that not only should the triple lock be scrapped, but that the state pension be frozen for the next three years, irrespective of any rises in the cost of living, and also that all remaining universal pensioner benefits should be means-tested (bus pass, free prescriptions, free eye tests).

And they throw in raising the state pension age to 70 too. Any political party proposing such an agenda would be rightly decimated by the electorate.

The triple lock is just about holding the line in most years to keep older people's income up with the cost of living.

But our state pension uplift last April was immediately swallowed up by the large rises in energy and utility bills, and council tax increases.

And according to a report by the House of Commons Library, pensioner poverty has been rising again since 2021.

This report reckons that, despite the triple lock, nearly three million pensioner households are living below a "minimum dignified socially acceptable standard of living" with "increasingly grim health outcomes".

The Policy Exchange and its supporters want to add millions of older people to these totals, with huge implications for our NHS, emergency services and other public services such as social care and housing.

They should be honest and estimate how many older lives would be cut short if their extreme policies were ever implemented.

We will be looking for all political parties, of the Right and Left, to disassociate themselves from these barmy ideas.

Every time the triple lock and state pension come under attack, it sends a shiver through the spines of millions of older people whose household budgets are on a knife edge week in and week out.

Labour, Conservatives and Reform must reassure us now that the triple lock will be safe for the whole of the next Parliament if they are in power.