The UK is miserly with social security. There’s a logic that this makes people look for work, which makes them better off. We won’t go into that, but Saint Rishi added £20 per week to the dole (Universal Credit) when Covid landed, which is an admission that it’s not enough to live on.
£20 a week to 5.5million households is about £5.5billion a year by my maths. That’s not small change. But if the alternative is going hungry it’s probably money well spent.
However he’s also being cagey about what’s to happen with the famous pension triple-lock (the guarantee to give a biggest of three never-shrinking numbers increase to state pension). Some of these numbers are pretty big this year. Average wages might be up by 8% – for the laudable reason that so many poor people have lost their jobs that the average goes up. My basic maths makes that an £8bn cost, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility say £3bn “more than previously anticipated”. Regardless, the OBR reckon within 3 years the triple lock will cost £6bn more on pensions than if they were just linked to inflation.
Now I don’t want to belittle oldies – the UK pension is miserly too compared to our peers – but not all oldies are poor. On average the generation that grew up after the Second World War have raked it in thanks to economic expansion and asset price inflation. Most are doing quite well thank you very much. The smart thing to do would be to look after the poor oldies. Not the smartest, nor the most fiscally coherent, approach is to treat a whole generation as paupers.
So why are they doing that? Well, who do the poor and who do the oldies vote for?
Bread? Let them eat cake… and have a prosecco with that darling.