Date published: 2006/03/18
The BBC says:
Any changes to the UK pension system must be affordable to the government, Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has said.
His comments came as ministers held public meetings across the UK to debate radical reform of the pension system.
More than 1,000 people at events in six cities have been voting on ideas including raising the retirement age.
The government says it will look at the results before publishing its proposals in the next couple of months.
London, Newcastle, Birmingham, Glasgow, Swansea and Belfast hosted the consultations, which coincide with National Pensions Day.
Meanwhile pensioners' groups staged a rally in London to protest over the level of the basic state pension.
The government is working out what sort of new laws it should propose in its forthcoming White Paper on pensions, to be published later this spring.
Mr Hutton told BBC News 24 said people must recognise that any reforms had cost implications.
"I don't mean just affordable this year or next year but over the next fifty years because the one thing you've got to do in these arguments is to build a sustainable future.
"You can't ask people to plan and to save in confidence for their retirement unless they know exactly what they are going to get in terms of the state pension," he said.
Lord Turner, who led the Pensions Commission, said he was confident the public would understand the need to work longer.
"As long as we explain to people what the reasons are for an increase in the state pension age, they will accept it," he told the BBC.
How clever of Hutton to state the obvious. The main hurdle to pension reform now is unfortunately the Labour government in the guise of Gordon Brown, so it's unlikely anything sensible will happen in the next five or ten years. In modern political life everybody expects to get something for nothing, and pensions are no exception. It is obvious that people should have to work longer before they get a pension, otherwise pensioners are going to have to expect less and less annual income as they live longer and longer. The sooner the government states this the better. But unfortunately Gordon Brown also believes in complicated and demeaning means-tested state pensions. And the government is also forcing most of the pension risk onto private citizens, with the inevitable occasional disaster as has been amply demonstrated time and again. Needless to say the one group of people insulated from all this risk are MPs, with gold-plated pensions. (And public sector workers are not far behind.)
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