Lords defeat Tory plan to remove pensions triple lock
Pensions: it seems this time the Tories have been prevented from stabbing our senior citizens in the back.
This is excellent news – and a welcome surprise after Labour Baron Prem Sikka signalled that the Lords had failed to support his amendment to save the triple lock.
It seems they then supported a cross-party amendment to keep the pensions triple lock in place.
Peers by 280 votes to 178 backed a cross-party motion to keep retirement payouts linked to earnings – a large majority of 102.
Under the amendment the so-called “triple lock” would stay in place but adjustments would be allowed to be made for the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The defeat means the government will either have to accept the amendment, or send its original plan back to the Lords again and risk prolonging the political row.
The Tories are now whining that they have only suspended the triple lock for a single year – but Baron Sikka demonstrated yesterday that this would result in a loss of more than £30 billion to pensioners by 2027:
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY: UK govt admits that suspension of the triple-lock will rob retirees of £5.4bn of pensions in 2022/23, £5,78bn in 2023/24, £6.1bn in 2024/25, £6.5bn in 2025/26 and £6.7bn in 2026/27, totalling £30.5bn over 5yrs (see page 136 of the link).https://t.co/yoDIiMbSsd
— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) November 2, 2021
Under the triple lock, the state pension rises every year by the general rate of increase in earnings, the rate of inflation, or 2.5 per cent – whichever is the highest.
Because earnings fell dramatically during the first part of the pandemic and then rebounded quickly, an unmodified version of the pension triple lock would see a sharp rise in the state pension of around 8 per cent. The government wants to pass legislation that would stop this from happening automatically, and says it will reinstate the policy after the pandemic.
Source: Boris Johnson suffers heavy defeat in House of Lords over pensions triple lock | The Independent
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Brilliant at least there are some humans in Westminster still who honour their previous commitments as opposed to the current cabal of untrustworthy so called politicians. Keep robbing the poor to feed the rich is not playing cricket.