The state pension could be under review as the government is faced with making difficult decisions to solve the UK’s savings and economic crisis, Torsten Bell, minister for pensions has said. Bell, who was speaking at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association annual investment conference in Edinburgh, refused to rule out including the state pension in the second part of the government’s pensions review.
When asked whether thestate pension reform should be part of the broader future pension landscape Bell said: “The review needs to be as broad as possible.”
He said: “There is no way to consider adequacy [the amount people are saving towards their pension that doesn’t integrate thinking about both state and private pensions.
Bell said the necessity of the state pension was in no doubt as it was relied on by an increasingly large number of people.
Bell warned that tough decisions may need to be made around pensions, but it was too late to embark on an all-party commission and the current Labour government had to come up with a solution.
“The country’s in a hole, and the public are really fed up, and we’re not going to solve that by people saying to me, ‘Oh, if only we could have some political consensus’.
“It’s not the mid 2000s. The economy has not been growing well for some time, that’s affecting people’s wages, all over the country, and hospitals are not working, and there are potholes on the roads.”
Bell said: “And every Saturday people are saying to me, this needs to be sorted, and if we don’t sort it, their faith in mainstream politics is being undermined.
“Our job is to take some sometimes difficult decisions to make sure we can start doing the basics again, an economy that grows, wages that rise, public services that function.
“I spend my whole life defending some tax decisions. People say to me, ‘Oh, that’s a risk’. You know, it’s an economic risk. But I’ll tell you what the economic risk is, us not doing these things.
“Otherwise you will all be saying to me in 10 years time, how come people are voting for mad people? And the answer will be, because we didn’t deliver the change that was needed.”
