The suggestion came from Sir Edward Troup, a former HMRC head who chancellor Rachel Reeves appointed to fight tax avoidance in April. In an interview with LBC, Sir Edward called for pensioners to “contribute possibly more” than Britons of working age in some circumstances.
His suggestion: “If the public finances are in a bit of a state, perhaps wealthy pensioners should be giving up their full state pension.”
He has previously called for the over-75s to lose their free “ridiculous” TV licences and inheritance tax to be increased.
This isn’t government policy, but it is a frightening insight into how Labour’s new team thinks.
Readers reacted with fury, with many saying that the state pension is an entitlement – theirs by right – because they have paid for it over their working lifetime.
Sadly, it isn’t. There’s no pot of cash belonging to you. It’s a benefit like any other, as the Department for Work and Pensions has previously made clear.
That means the government decides how much you get and how to tax it, too.
Plenty of other benefits are already means tested, including Universal Credit, Pension Credit, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Support, Tax Credits and Income Support.
This means that it is perfectly possible for Labour to add your state pension to that list.
It’s frightening.
For now, we just don’t know what it’s planning to do.
As I wrote last October, if the state pension had been done properly, it would be an entitlement.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t done properly. Politicians can therefore do with it what they like.
Andrew Tully, technical services director at Nucleus Financial, has confirmed that Labour does have the power to extend means testing to the state pension.
Today, how much you get depends on how many national insurance (NI) contributions you made during your working lifetime.
Under means testing, how much you receive would also rest on factors such as your income, and maybe your partner’s income, too.
As well as the value of your savings, stocks and shares, Premium Bonds and property other than your main home.
Means testing the state pension wouldn’t be easy, though. Tully described it as “an administrative nightmare”.
“It would be a massive ongoing exercise to obtain all pensioners details on a regular basis, to work out whether they qualified for a full state pension or not.”
He added: “As asset values change all the time, they would probably have to be assessed every year.”
The DWP would also have to work out how this interacted with other benefits, such as housing benefit and long-term care if required.
Worse, many would be elderly and vulnerable, and may struggle to supply the right information, Tully warned.
With 12.6million now receiving the state pension, this would be a hugely costly exercise.
Which ultimately may work in our favour. “The sheer cost and complexity could deter Labour,” Tully said.
There’s another factor for Labour to consider. “It would have to issue a period of notice, meaning Treasury coffers would be unlikely to benefit for some years.”
So Labour would have to wait for its money, while pouring a huge amount of investment into the new means testing system.
To repeat, Labour has not publicly said it will means test the state pension. Reeves is free to ignore Sir Edward, who appears to have gone beyond his brief, here.
But it’s terrifying to think that there’s nothing to stop it from doing so, except public opinion.
Millions of better off pensioners would hate it, but the political calculation is this: would they vote Labour in the first place? Probably not, leaving Reeves free to offend them.
Labour chancellor Reeves is plotting a pensions tax raid in her autumn Budget – protect yourself by doing these five things now.
