Andy Burnham has announced that the current pensions triple lock will be replaced from April 2030 if Labour wins the next general election, with the savings put towards his promised National Care Service.
The Prime Minister told the Labour conference in Liverpool, in his first conference speech as prime minister, that the lock would be honoured until the end of this parliament, as pledged in Labour’s 2024 manifesto. From April 2030, the state pension would rise each year by inflation or a minimum of 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher. The existing annual link with earnings growth would go, although Mr Burnham said the pension “will hold its value relative to earnings over time so that pensioners will always share in the rising prosperity of the nation”. He did not explain how that longer-term pledge would work.
“This change will generate significant savings, which we will use to build up our own National Care Service,” he told delegates. “I won’t pretend some of this won’t be difficult. I accept I may pay a political price. But someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off.”
The triple lock commits governments to raise the state pension every year by the highest of earnings growth, inflation or 2.5 per cent. Introduced by the coalition in its first budget in 2010 and applied from the following year, it remains in force: pensioners received a 4.8 per cent rise this April, paid to more than 12 million of them. Labour’s 2024 manifesto, the one that won the party power, promised to keep it. The change Mr Burnham announced would take effect only if Labour wins the general election expected in 2029, and it frames the run-up to John Healey’s Budget on October 28.
The National Care Service is the pledge Mr Burnham has chosen to build his premiership around: social care in England, free at the point of use, run on NHS principles and delivered after the next election. In July he asked Baroness Casey to bring her review of the system forward by a year, noting that it was “almost 30 years since the Royal Commission on Social Care” and, by his count, that 22 reviews had followed it. On Sunday he told the BBC the new system would mean “everyone contributes, everyone’s covered”, though “not precisely, necessarily, in the same way that we currently pay for the NHS”, and accepted higher taxes would probably be needed. On Monday, a senior government source told The Telegraph that ending the triple lock could form part of a “grand bargain” with pensioners: free social care in return for smaller annual increases.
The unions were not persuaded. Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, Labour’s largest union backer, called the plan “morally wrong” and “electoral suicide”, and told The Telegraph: “I don’t see why they should look at cutting the triple lock for pensioners when we could look at the 50 richest families in Britain who are worth £500bn. In a Labour Budget, you need to look at Labour things.”
Independent analysts question whether the savings can carry the promise. Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Sky News the change would raise “relatively small amounts, in the hundreds of millions over the next parliament” and would not pay for universal social care, which she said would need “much more substantive tax rises” for a service costing tens of billions a year. The IFS calculates that, had the new system been in place since 2011, spending on the state pension would be about £9bn lower today. The pension bill stands at some £146bn a year, roughly half of all benefit spending, according to the Department for Work and Pensions.
The rest of the speech followed the same promise to fix what Mr Burnham has called decades of drift. The environment secretary, Angela Eagle, will introduce a strengthened Water Bill whose centrepiece is the repeal of “Margaret Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership of water companies”, though Mr Burnham stopped short of committing to nationalise any of them. A new publicly owned GB Grid, under the Great British Energy umbrella, will invest in electricity networks and speed up grid connections, and he asked the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, to move faster in breaking the link between household bills and international gas prices. He also promised to “change the education system and the welfare system” to tackle youth unemployment, with almost a million young people estimated to be out of work, education and training. Before he spoke, he had promised “less drift and more direction”; in Liverpool he offered “a more serious and thought through prospectus for the future of Britain than people have been offered in a generation”.
What the speech did not set out was a plan for immigration. The extracts released ahead of time said nothing about it, and in the speech itself Sky News’s coverage records a single mention: a line in Mr Burnham’s attack on the “British right”, whose record, he said, included “immigration control weakened by Brexit”. No immigration measures were announced. The absence of new immigration measures comes against polling that has repeatedly placed immigration among voters’ leading concerns. A survey for Sky News by YouGov in September 2025 found 58 per cent of GB adults picked immigration among the top three issues facing the country, ahead of the economy on 51 per cent. In January 2026, YouGov found 23 per cent of Britons wanted the Government to make immigration its top priority for 2026, ahead of the cost of living on 16 per cent. Both surveys are dated measurements of opinion in their moment, not a read on how the public judges the Government on the day of the speech. Harriet Harman, the former deputy Labour leader, had said before the speech that Mr Burnham “absolutely has to” address the subject.
Within Labour, some senior figures have argued that the triple lock should be reformed sooner. Lord Blunkett, the former work and pensions secretary, wants it axed this side of an election, saying there is “an extremely good intellectual case for ending the triple lock” and that moving sooner could raise up to £22bn by 2030. Darren Jones, the former chief secretary to the prime minister, has suggested reform is an “option” worth considering if money is moving towards older people through social care anyway. The Telegraph has reported that a double lock could save between £15bn and £22bn by 2030, depending on how pensions are uprated.
There are also divisions within the opposition over the future of the triple lock. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has ruled out any change to it, although The Telegraph reports that some of her top team privately admit the cost is unsustainable. Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economy spokesman, called the announcement “frankly outrageous” and said the money should come instead from the benefits bill, foreign aid and net zero subsidies. “It’s only fair that we have the backs of those who have worked hard their entire lives,” he said. Mr Jenrick and Nigel Farage have reportedly clashed over whether Reform should keep backing the lock; the party denies any split.
Claire Bullivant, chief executive of the Great British PAC, said:
“Andy Burnham is effectively asking pensioners to help pay for Labour’s latest enormous spending commitment by weakening the protection around their own pensions.
“These are people who have worked, paid taxes and contributed to this country for decades. Many depend heavily on the state pension, and removing the annual earnings guarantee risks leaving them progressively further behind working households.
“Even Unite has called the proposal morally wrong. Perhaps the real question Mr Burnham should be asking is why, in a country facing record levels of taxation and vast public spending, his Government’s answer to yet another funding problem is to reach into pensioners’ pockets.
“Social care desperately needs fixing, but robbing Peter to pay Paul is not reform. Britain needs a government prepared to make difficult choices about its own spending before asking pensioners to make the sacrifice.”
Separate research provides some context for that comparison. Almond Financial’s 2026 Pension Breakeven Index found the full new state pension sits only about 26 per cent above basic living costs, leaving an average surplus of around £220 a month and ranking Britain behind Ireland and France. The same firm’s data, cited by inews in August, put Norway’s maximum state pension at 2,163.89 euros a month, against £1,045.63 for Britain’s full new state pension. The two systems are not directly comparable: Norway’s pension includes an earnings-related element and is part-funded by oil revenue, while Britain’s flat-rate new state pension depends on years of National Insurance contributions. Age UK cautioned that comparing pension systems between countries is complicated.
Mike Rouse, Chief Technology Officer at the Great British PAC, said:
“Norwegian pensioners receive more than double what British pensioners get. Once basic living costs are paid, our pensioners are left with around £220 a month, which puts us behind Ireland and France.
“The triple lock isn’t perfect, but you don’t pull away the ladder before you’ve built a stronger one, and without real economic growth there’s nothing to replace it with.
“Breaking it will hit the poorest pensioners hardest, just as the winter fuel cut did.
“Labour was forced to back down then, and I expect they’ll be forced to back down again.”
The winter fuel precedent he refers to is a matter of record. In 2024 the then government restricted the Winter Fuel Payment in England and Wales to pensioners receiving Pension Credit or certain means-tested benefits. The policy was subsequently changed. In June 2025, the Government announced that from winter 2025/26 the payment would go to all households where someone is over state pension age, with HMRC reclaiming it from those with taxable incomes above £35,000.
Mr Burnham closed his speech by asking delegates to “get behind this plan”. “I accept people will not agree with every part of it, but I believe it can turn Britain around,” he said. “We can’t carry on as we are. Politics-as-usual has taken Britain backwards. More of the same isn’t good enough and isn’t going to get us where we need to be.“
