Older people have escaped the worst of the chancellor's austerity, but they will soon have to start delaying retirement
Of all the vast cuts that George Osborne has made to social security, the plan to make people wait longer for their pensions is – on the face of it – one of the more reasonable.
After all, benefits for the over-64s consume £111bn out of the £202bn welfare budget, an outright majority, and this is where the real pressure will build in an ageing society. But while the coalition has regarded it as necessary to impose shin-kicking requirements on the unemployed, to force poor young adults to share flats into their 30s and to cap benefits for larger families, payments to the elderly have scarcely been touched. Older Britons have clung on to bus passes and winter fuel payments, and granted exemptions from cuts to housing and council tax rebates.
Together with the new semi-compulsory workplace savings accounts and state payments that rise with earnings, eventual increases in the pension age to 66, 67 and then 68 were part of the new settlement forged by Adair Turner's Pensions Commission in 2005. Some of these increases have since been brought forward.
But Treasury officials have always been especially keen to mimic Sweden, by forging an automatic link between life expectancy and pensionable age. The autumn statement will create this through the institution of a regular Whitehall review, which could imply a pension age of 70 by the 2060s.
That way, if life expectancy at 65 continues to surge – for men, it has recently been rising by two years with each passing decade – the government will not have to go back to parliament and plead with MPs; instead, it will potentially be able to allow the demographers and the accountants to do the job.Great news for the politicians and their civil servants, but will the rest of us be forced to "Work till we drop"? In principle, it should be possible to continue useful careers for longer, seeing as "healthy life expectancy" has tended to rise in parallel with lifespans as a whole. In practice, because of worsening health inequalities between rich and poor, large parts of the population will be legitimately concerned – all the more so because the ever-harsher regime of sickness and unemployment benefits deny 60-somethings too frail to work a decent safety net.
Beyond this, the prospect of indefinitely raising pension ages could prevent future cohorts from following the example of early retiring baby-boomers, in active grand-parenting and sustaining what David Cameron used to call the big society. Delayed pensions might rebalance social security spending, but will do nothing to close the emerging economic faultline between the generations.
After the near-tripling of student fees, this week brought news that the recession had knocked the wages of young workers by a disproportionate 12%, while the incomes of older generations were much better maintained.
Add in a housing market that enriches those who bought homes decades ago while locking out the young, and you might think that the priority would be tipping the scales in favour of Generation Y; telling this cohort it will have to slog for longer pushes the other way.
If that seems perverse, the most-enlightening statistics do not concern pension expenditure or demographics, but voting behaviour. In 2010, only 44% of 18-24 year olds voted, compared to 76% of the over-64s.