The Politics Actuary #15: Triple Lock

by Patrick Lee on 15 Jun 2026 in categories actuarial with tags cartoons

The triple lock guarantees that the state pension rises each year by whichever is highest: earnings growth, inflation, or 2.5%.

Stated plainly, this means the state pension rises faster than working-age earnings in any year when earnings growth is not the highest of the three — that is, whenever earnings growth falls below inflation, or below 2.5%. In any year earnings lag either benchmark, pensions pull ahead; they never fall behind.

A lock implies stability. A ratchet implies one-way movement. Over a long enough period, the triple lock guarantees that pensioner incomes will compound faster than the incomes of the people whose taxes pay for them. That is not stability. That is a structurally widening gap.

Patrick has paused his dinner to sketch this on a napkin. The exponential curve labelled “State Pension” diverges sharply upward from the nearly flat line labelled “Working-Age Earnings”. Lily continues eating. Beth glances at the TV banner reading “Triple Lock Guaranteed — PM” and returns to her plate. Pucktick eyes Patrick’s abandoned fork from beneath the table.

The actuarial profession has, for years, modelled the long-term cost of the triple lock and arrived at the same conclusion every time: the policy is unsustainable on any honest projection. Successive governments have continued to guarantee it because the maths is invisible to most voters and the consequences fall on a future government.

In our world we have a name for an assumption you adopt because it is politically convenient and which you have no plan to actually meet. We call it aspirational.

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The Politics Actuary series applies actuarial scrutiny to political claims, economic policy, and public statistics. Previous entry in this theme: #2 Y-Axis Trick.