Calls to end the pensions triple lock grow louder every week. Think tankers, business groups and voices from across the Labour family say it should go. 

There may be 1.7 million pensioners in poverty. But the retired have had it too easy for too long, we’re told. And at the Budget John Healey will be staring into a terrifying fiscal hole. 

So, should Labour scrap this most popular but expensive of policies? A policy that two thirds of people support, including a plurality of under-35s? One the party pledged to retain in its 2024 manifesto.

The answer is yes – but not yet. 

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This Autumn the Chancellor should pre-announce an end to the lock – not for now but a date in the 2030s. That way he will avoid both breaking Labour’s manifesto and also facing yet another election cycle where the pressure to renew the pledge is impossible to resist.

This is not just a political contortion. Keeping the triple lock for a few more years is the Labour thing to do. During the summer the , run by Labour peer and trade unionist Jeannie Drake, showed that pensioner poverty will rise in coming decades without the triple lock. It is already higher than it was 15 years ago.

We need a proper plan for ending financial hardship in retirement – one that includes an affordable and sustainable roadmap for the state pension over time.

The problem with the triple lock is that no one has ever said what it is for. It increases pretty much at random – some years rising in line with earnings and other years by more. When it was launched the assumed the policy’s annual cost would be £5 billion in 2029. In fact, it will cost £15 billion by then, compared to the alternative of uprating pensions with earnings each year. 

Without a target or an end-point the state pension will grow by more than earnings, decade after decade. In the long term that is not sustainable. Taxpayers could never afford to pay a pension that was converging on the typical salary. Or rather, they could, but only if the state pension age were also increased to a point that many would never live to see.

The answer to the dilemma is for the Chancellor to say what the triple lock is there to do and when it won’t be needed any more.

Healey should declare that the purpose of the triple lock is to prevent poverty. When the pension reaches a level where it is enough to stop financial hardship for a typical retiree, then the lock should stop. 

We are not too far from that day. In 2026 the new state pension is worth around £9 less per week than the amount a single homeowner needs to escape poverty, once all their bills, bar Council Tax, are taken into account. The distance between the pension and the poverty line is therefore small (as long as local authorities find everyone entitled to a reduction in their Council Tax). 

Labour can announce that the gap will be closed within 10 years. And then the triple lock will end.

The policy should be replaced by a new double lock – where the pension must increase at least by inflation every year and track rising earnings on a five-year rolling basis. Each parliament, there should also be an independent review to assess whether the value of the pension remains sufficient to prevent poverty for pensioners who own their home. Means-testing would only be needed for older people who rent or have extra living costs.

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With this plan, selling the demise of the lock would no longer be something that Labour MPs need to fear. If it has an explicit rationale – the triple lock can be retired when its mission is accomplished. And if the rationale is poverty prevention, then Labour MPs will have an answer they can believe in, to both ‘when’ and ‘why’ the lock will stop.

The Conservatives and Reform UK are already tied in knots over the triple lock. They yearn for spending cuts and yet they dare not take on their older voter base. What answer would they find to this Labour pre-announcement? 

The hawks would call for an earlier end to a policy now designed to prevent undeserved hardship. The doves would moan that it was ending at all, but with fewer grounds when the date is some way off and the reasoning is clear and fair.

We cannot carry on with the triple lock forever. Over decades the costs will mount and mount. A plan and a trigger to end it in the 2030s is essential, not least to help appease bond markets that judge our public finances over decades.

But in a typical year the triple lock costs little or no more than earnings indexation. The Chancellor will not lose too much money by pre-announcing its demise – and transforming the triple lock into a Labour plan to end hardship in retirement.

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