Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has revealed the Tories are “going to look at means testing” the pension triple lock.
During a phone-in from a member of the public while on Iain Dale’s LBC show, the Tory leader said the party needs to “keep growing” with its approach to this area, despite supporting it while in power.
Ms Badenoch’s comments follow the Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride claiming that the triple lock is “unsustainable”. State pensions currently rise each year by whichever is highest out of the rate of inflation, average earnings or a minimum of 2.5%.
However, the Leader of the Opposition said: “We’re going to look at means testing [the triple lock].” She added: “Means testing is something which we don’t do properly here.
“But what Rachel Reeves has done is the extreme version of that, where people who are actually on the breadline have had their winter fuel payment taken away.
“We don’t have a system that knows who should get what. That’s the sort of thing that we need to be looking at.”
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer came under fire for being “anti-pensioner” after appointing former think tank chief Torsten Bell, who called for the triple lock to be abolished.
Mr Bell described the triple lock as “indefensible” and called for it to be axed in his role as chief executive of the Resolution Foundation in 2020.
He claimed that benefits for pensioners were rising faster than those claimed by working-age people and urged the Government at the time “to replace the triple lock, and pay more attention to the contrast with working-age benefits”.
In an article written jointly with Resolution Foundation researcher Laura Gardiner, Mr Bell said: “Whatever your view on a rising state pension relative to earnings, the contrast with the continued erosion of the value of working-age benefits is indefensible.”
Mr Bell also wrote on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that the “triple lock needs sorting”.
