A new report from the Pensions Policy Institute lands like a brick through a stained-glass window. Three-quarters of British workers, it warns, are not on track for even a moderate retirement income. You read that correctly. Not a lavish retirement. Not a comfortable one. A moderate one. The kind of retirement that was once considered the baseline for a nation that prided itself on its quiet decency and financial prudence.
What we are witnessing, ladies and gentlemen, is the slow motion collapse of the post-war social contract. The promise that if you worked hard, paid your taxes, and stashed away a little each month, the state and your employer would hold up their end of the bargain. That promise is now in tatters. The report reveals that the average worker is heading for an income shortfall that will leave them reliant on the basic state pension: a sum currently hovering around the poverty line.
Let us pause to consider the sheer scale of this failure. We have a population that has been sold a lie. The lie was that property values would always rise. That defined benefit pensions were a luxury for previous generations, but defined contribution schemes would do the job just as well. That a few percentage points of national insurance here and a bit of auto-enrolment there would patch the hole. The hole is a chasm. And we are all dancing on the edge.
There are those who will tell you that this crisis is a matter of individual responsibility. That people simply do not save enough, that they spend their money on avocado toast and Netflix subscriptions. This is the kind of smug, ahistorical nonsense that makes me reach for the smelling salts. The real culprit is a combination of stagnant wages, soaring housing costs, and a financialised economy that treats pensions as a profit centre rather than a social good. When you spend half your income on rent or a mortgage, when your real wages have not risen in twenty years, where exactly is the money for your pension supposed to come from?
We are creating a generation of retirees who will be poorer than their parents. This has happened before, of course. It happened in the late Roman Empire, when the corn dole bought off the mob but the legions went unpaid. It happened in the twilight of the Edwardian era, when the old poorhouses filled up with men who had fought for the Empire and now had nothing but a medal and a cough. We are repeating the pattern with the precision of a Greek tragedy.
The solution, if there is one, will not be popular. It involves either significantly higher taxes on the working age population (a political suicide note) or a dramatic reduction in pension expectations for the wealthy (equally unpalatable). Or we could simply continue the current trajectory, in which case the word 'retirement' will become a synonym for 'premature death from cold and malnutrition'. For a nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe, this is not just an economic failure. It is a moral one.
