This is careful reading from David Robbins, what would this blog do without his help over the years? Thanks David and the support from WTW.

From the IMF report. 👇Can’t read too much into a paraphrase, but this seems to suggest that HMG hinted that policies arising from its pension reviews will save £ relative to OBR forecasts. OBR assumes Triple Lock survives until at least the 2070s and that State Pension Age… pic.twitter.com/eL7d64cz6K

— David Robbins (@David_J_Robbins) July 28, 2025

I suspect that the Pension Commission will take a lot of attention but the review of the state pension is more likely to balance the books over time.

We have no longer got a state second pension (formerly SERPS) and we have in its stead a workplace pension delivered for the private sector through DC schemes with the contributions being mandated not less than the auto-enrolment minima.

Part of the problem for the Treasury is that there is so little consistency in the outcomes of these workplace pensions. They are not providing income and so not satisfying the purpose of the tax incentives offered. The partial change in taxation (disincentivising the use of pension pots to mitigate inheritance tax) is a minor triumph but the shift to default decumulation to regular lifetime income is what is needed to create some equivalence between public pensions and the mess that private workplace pensions are now in.

Well “mess” is my word, but for those with a spreadsheet mentality, something a lot more predictable is needed for decisions on state pensions to be taken. The Pension Schemes Bill is a precursor to a state pension review. I suspect questions of adequacy are of little interest to HMT.

I am working with HMRC to get incentives finally paid to those on such low incomes that their contributions towards their pension have slipped under the HMRC’s payment system. Low Earner’s Pension Payments will begin being paid more than 12 years after Kate Upcraft identified that they were due. Net pay and Relief at Source incentive systems show just how little “fairness” enters into the equation.

Taxation is one Treasury concern, another is the liability from pension credit take up increasing and the third is the state pension. These are what the Pension Commission should be focussing on now that we have no state second pension and workplace pensions that no longer pay a universal pension based on earnings but anything that employers and incentives pay.

I thank David Robbins. I suspect  like me he is missing much  sense of fairness for those in retirement today; – let alone intergenerational fairness over the next 50 years. We need work on out state pension system to be done thoroughly.

David Fairs and Michael Johnson had this out five years ago when TPR’s blogs were starting up, you can read David’s here– worth considering before turning thoughts to the review of the State Pension

We kept coming back to the theme of people’s expectations versus their actual pension outcomes. This was particularly interesting in terms of the differences between DB and DC pensions, and is particularly poignant when thinking about millennials, who – some argue – have unrealistic expectations that they are basing on their parents’ experiences of pensions.

This blog was written by Fairs over 6 years and written in his then role as head of policy at TPR. How little has changed in the discussion and how much needs to. Auto-enrolment was still in its first flush of success, now it needs to give the savers pensions and the mess of pots must become something to replace second pensions for those planning how we manage the State Pension in the final half of the century.