George Osborne’s decision to bring forward raising the retirement age strikes me as thoroughly sensible. Indeed, both his proposal on the retirement age and the one year public sector pay freeze have the merit of being such reasonable measures given the severity of the crisis that it is quite hard to oppose them without appearing to not grasp how bad a state the public finances are in. I suspect that if the Public and Commercial Services Union did carry out its threat to strike over the pay freeze for those earning more than 18,000 it would have little public sympathy.
But one further idea the Tories should consider in government is following Denmark’s lead and index-linking the pension to life expectancy. This would both save money and be far fairer than the current system in inter-generational terms.
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