Britain’s state pension is about to blow
Health Secretary Wes Streeting says that the changes to the Welfare Bill will ‘give people peace of mind’. Perhaps for some, but certainly not economists. Britain’s welfare crisis is staggering – £313 billion a year is spent on disability payments, Universal Credit, winter fuel payments, Motability, child benefit, and, most expensive of them all, the state pension. Currently, the state pension costs over £150 billion a year, and is engineered to grow at the highest of either inflation, wage growth, or 2.5 per cent. When you factor in our rapidly aging population, the welfare state is quite literally primed to blow. Whitehall is on a collision course of its own