Given the increasingly dire state of the economy, a means-tested state pension might now be inevitable.

I’ve argued before in these pages that a possible solution could involve increasing the state pension age to 75, and it’s fair to say this met with some resistance. But would means-testing it be a better alternative?

If you are minded to dismiss this speculation as mere scaremongering, consider the facts. In 1970 there were roughly five workers paying into the tax system for every retired person. Today the ratio is three to one and by 2070 it is expected to be two to one. The state pension costs about £150 billion a year, an increase of about 60 per cent in the past ten years, driven by the generous triple lock as well as the demands of a growing pensioner population.

The state pension already accounts for more than 40 per cent of our welfare budget, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and its cost is expected to rise further. The OBR predicts that spending on the state pension will rise from about 5 per cent of GDP today to 7.7 per cent by the early 2070s. This is not sustainable.

Many pensioners absolutely need and rely on their state pension. We can’t let them down. Pensioner poverty is still a problem, particularly for older, single pensioners.

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Pensioner affluence is a thing too though. I have seen first-hand many pensioners who enjoy, but who also absolutely do not need, the £10,000 to £15,000 a year that they get from the state. Many of today’s pensioners own their own home and enjoyed the benefits of working lives building up guaranteed pensions through the latter part of the 20th century.

Wealth taxes have been espoused by some populist agitators, but before we go down that road, maybe we should simply ask why we hand out triple-locked welfare payments to those who don’t need it?

The triple lock has increased the state pension by the higher of inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent each year since 2012. And this increasing cost comes against a backdrop of stagnant per capita economic growth, which has averaged less than 1 per cent a year over the past 25 years.

There has been much discussion in the news recently about the usurious cost of student debt, with the government charging interest rates that would make a mafia loan shark blush. Those same graduates now face an uncertain job market and impossibly high house prices: in what reality does it seem fair to keep taxing them to pay for today’s pensioners?

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Our national debt is fast approaching 100 per cent of our annual economic output. The cost of servicing that debt is now more than £100 billion a year. We spend more on debt interest than we do on education, more than we spend on transport and defence combined. In only a handful of years over the last few decades has the government actually managed to reduce our debt. The default setting is to borrow, borrow, and borrow more every year. This too is unsustainable. The imperative for economic growth and reduced public spending demands hard choices of our politicians.

So how could means-testing the state pension work? We already have pension credit, a means-tested top up for pensioners on low incomes, which only costs about £6 billion a year. It could be possible to dispense with the triple lock and deliberately allow the state pension to fall back in real terms, while at the same time significantly increasing the generosity of pension credit. This would target our limited welfare budget towards those who genuinely need it.

Politically, this is fraught with danger, given pensioners’ electoral clout. But if not this, then what is the answer? A change to the system is essential and inevitable. Sooner or later some brave or unlucky politician is going to have to grasp this nettle. In the meantime, the younger you are, the less reliance I would advise you to place on the state to see you through retirement.

Tom McPhail is a pensions commentator with 20 years’ experience across the industry