Steve Webb isn’t afraid to hold back and though he recognises that the triple-lock isn’t sustainable, he sees no alternative to continuing it right now for people who are ill-served by private pensions.

In short, a decent state pension remains vital because the other leg of retirement provision – private pensions – is simply not pulling its weight at the moment. This is especially true for women, who are most at risk of having only modest private pension income to top up their state pension.

The root of the problem is that – in the private sector at least – traditional “gold-plated” salary-related company pensions are in long-term decline. With every passing year, the number of new retirees with any salary-related pension is falling, as is the average pension of those who did manage to build up some pension of this type for part of their working life.

This would not matter if the newer defined contribution-style pensions were rising to take up the strain. But this will not be true for a couple of decades.

The policy of “automatic enrolment” into workplace pensions only started in 2012 and only covered all workplaces at the full 8pc contribution rate by 2018 – just eight years ago. It will take a lot longer than this for these pension pots to build up to meaningful amounts for most people.

Actually 2012 – when auto-enrolment pensions and 2014 when the pensions ended. Since then we’ve been saving for pots and it wasn’t till the Pension Schemes Act of 2026 that we’ve had interest in getting ordinary people in the private sector saving for a pension.

What we have now is people concerned about the indexation of their state pension while not giving a thought for their DC pensions, because there aren’t any! The pre 97 pensioners who’ve been waiting – some over 30 years for an increase in their pensions know what it is like to get a level pension. It means a fall in pensions in real terms with inflation being the measure of the fall each year.

We are pretending that what appears on the Pension Dashboard by way of Estimated Retirement Income will be comparable to the State Pension – but it will show a level pension as the pre-97 crew are suffering.

It is not hard to see why Steve Webb says that the private sector is failing those who save into its retirement savings plans!

I suspect that where Steve’s article is published (in the Daily Telegraph) has relatively few hard up or soon to be hard up pensioners. But he points out that

the Government reckons that around 14.5 million of us are set for a nasty shock when we retire and are likely to have to tighten our belts.

I haven’t got much to say about what Steve says but a lot to say about what we could do, which Steve called “defined ambition” when he was a minister.

We must , if we are to rid our dependency on the state pension and its triple lock, get proper pensions paying out to those 14.5m +.

This means saying with one breath that we should all have the freedom that Steve brought in, but we must get adequate income with another breath. We cannot get more income without sacrificing something and I know that “something is freedom”.

Pension?

So let’s stop thinking of having £100,000 or somewhere need it as “wealth” and recognise it is around 5% of that as a lifetime income which goes up with inflation but not the triple lock. The £100,000 isn’t wealth, it isn’t enough – added to the state pension – to make us rich but it is indeed realistic.

When we start thinking about the inadequacy of our pension pots in paying us a lifetime wage, we realise how much we need the state pension and the triple lock.