Tory pension confusion

The pension age is going to rise; the Tories now say they intend it to happen more quickly than Labour’s plans. The media yesterday were full of party briefings about the men’s age rising from 65 to 66 in 2016; women would follow more slowly, going up from the current 60.

Alas, David Cameron told the Today programme this morning that things aren’t quite so clear. There’d be an “independent person to head a review” after the election, to look at how the pension age could be raised, from 2016 “at the earliest”.

So a lot of people in their fifties no longer have a known retirement date to plan towards.

Floating a change to the pension age just a few years away from people’s retirement, and then telling them they’ll have to wait to find out, is pretty irresponsible.

Cameron paints this as a proposal to deal with the ballooning deficit. But under either party, the bulk of the deficit reduction will be taken care of by 2016. So the policy – if we can really call it that – is both too late and too soon, as well as being too vague.