When Saturn eats his children: the case against the triple lock

A pay-as-you-go pension, an ageing population and stagnant productivity add up to a growing bill for the young

Maxwell Marlow is the Director of Public Affairs at the Adam Smith Institute.

This piece has been adapted from a speech given at the Battle of Ideas Festival 2026.

When it comes to pensions, as with many areas of policy, an artistic reference can capture the soul of the issue in a way that dry statistics cannot. Many of you, being learned and cultured readers of Economic Affairs, will be aware of the Black Paintings by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. And if you are aware of these era-defining Romantic paintings, then you will be aware of their most famous: Saturn Devouring His Son. When Saturn learned of the prophecy that he would be overthrown by his children, he set about devouring them one by one. It was not until his wife, Rhea, hid their son Jupiter that the feasting ceased and Saturn was forced to regurgitate his progeny.

The triple lock will not literally bankrupt Britain: a country that borrows in its own currency cannot be forced to default. But it is a symbol of everything that is wrong with how the state views its role in our lives.

I am a small-state classical liberal of the Smithian school. The state exists to protect property rights, uphold contracts, defend the realm from threats external and internal, and provide public goods and services. Cards on the table: I believe the state pension itself, like most of the welfare state, oversteps that duty. But we are not here to debate that.

This year, we will spend an extra £15bn on the state pension a year until 2030, according to the OBR. Originally, the triple lock was to cost £450 million in 2014-15. It’s obviously much, much higher today. Let’s step back. Overall pensioner benefits were £177.8bn in 2025–26, about 55% of social security spending, including £146.1bn on the state pension. Let’s include healthcare spending too – of the £217bn we spend on health services, 32% goes on 65–84s and 10% on over-85s; an 85-year-old costs 5.6 times as much as a 30-year-old.

Now – those in favour of the triple lock argue that pensioners have paid in with their National Insurance contributions for 35 years or more. So, they say, it is only right that they receive this increase – but who is paying for that? There is no pot with your name on it. Like the French and American social security systems, the state pension is pay-as-you-go: it operates like a Ponzi scheme. Today’s workers pay for today’s pensions, triple lock included. Almost every penny paid in since the modern National Insurance scheme began in 1948 has been spent.

Adam Smith Institute analysis has found that the average person born in 1956 will receive £291,000 more than they paid in National Insurance. It also projects that by 2040, 22.7 million people will be claiming National Insurance-funded benefits, including the state pension, with only 34 million people of working age to fund them: roughly two claimants for every three people of working age. And by 2036, spending on those benefits, mostly the state pension, is projected to exceed the entire income from National Insurance contributions.

Britain is getting older. It is barely getting more productive. The system now requires workers to shoulder ever higher taxes on work, during a period of high inflation and interest rates, in order to prop up a generation that has done relatively well over the past 50 years.

It did not have to get to this point. Lord Turner, who chaired the Pensions Commission, warned in 2005 that the state pension was on an unsustainable and unfair path, five years before the triple lock. Too few of his proposals were acted on. And just like with social care or any of the numerous commissions the government pays for, we are suffering the outcomes.

If Britain had not put so much of its wealth into housing and had invested more in stocks and shares (just 8% of the average household’s net wealth), our economy would be more productive. The taxes on workers could be lower, we would be paid more, and we would not be in the crisis we are facing now. But because we preferred houses and flats, inert, unproductive and frankly expensive money sinks inflated by restrictive planning, to productive capital, we are having this debate.

So: will the Triple Lock bankrupt Britain? No. But it will bankrupt the soul of this nation.

We, today’s young workers, spent the best part of two years of our early adult lives in lockdown to protect an older generation, and we are now taxed heavily to support it. We cannot afford housing, yet we transfer cash from our paycheques to landlords who are themselves likely to be drawing the state pension. We stand baffled, drowning in national debt run up by governments we did not elect, while older generations demand that our firstborn pay for their welfare.

If you want to know why there are riots on the streets of Paris, of Madrid, of Brussels, and why so many young people are turning to radical, even authoritarian, politics, ask yourself: is Saturn eating his children in Britain today? And if the answer is yes (which I think it is), then it’s time to scrap the triple lock and go much further.