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Nigel Farage has confirmed Reform UK would keep the triple lock for state pensions and will fund it with the “biggest cuts to the benefits bill ever seen in this country”.
The Reform UK leader has previously been sceptical about guaranteeing the triple lock, warning that the current system is “unaffordable on a national level”.
At a press conference in central London, Reform’s Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick pledged to cut “tens and tens of billions” of pounds of government waste and reset spending to “actually put the British people first”.
“We have already identified £40bn of savings every year”, he added.
The U-turn comes just months after Mr Farage said that his party would not “guarantee anything” to pensioners, saying they would have “to see what the economics of this are like nearer the next election”.
Mr Farage defended the shift, saying: “When I said the jury’s out on the triple lock and what we would decide to do on this… if I could just interpret that into simple English, what I meant was the jury’s out. Not that I’d made my mind up either way.
“And we have discussed it, and we have debated it, and we’ve decided it’s going to stay.”
But he insisted his party could afford the triple lock “many, many times over” because in two weeks it would outline “the most radical proposals to cutting welfare ever seen in this country”.
He defended the spending on pensioners, describing them for the most part as “people who have actually worked and paid into the system”.
But he also suggested that people could have to work for longer before they reach a new, higher state pension age, describing it as a “massive subject” and saying there was “a logic” to the idea “provided people are fit…, even if many people find it rather unpalatable”.
Reform UK will also look to scrap defined benefit pensions for new entrants in the public sector, he announced.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (PA Wire)
On benefits cuts, Mr Jenrick made clear they would apply to people born in Britain, but he added his party would say more in the next few weeks about that hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the UK as part of the so-called ‘Boriswave’,
He claimed that the cost to the UK of the wave, “if they remain in the UK for the rest of their lives, is likely to be of a scale that we have not known in our lifetime, a sum of money as big as Covid or the Second World War, a giant sum of money. And that has to be stopped.”
The triple lock, introduced by David Cameron’s government, means the state pension rises by the rate of inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent – whichever is highest.
The system is popular with pensioners, but there have been increasing questions over its economic viability in recent years.
A Conservative source said Reform UK were “all over the place on the triple lock”, adding: “It’s increasingly clear Jenrick is strong-arming Farage into backing unfunded policies with no credible plan to deliver them as Reform’s local election campaign descends into chaos.”
The shift means Reform will commit to keeping the policy if it wins the next general election.
The announcement comes as the party vies to win votes in elections to English councils, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd at the start of next month.
Mr Jenrick recently said he had “always been a supporter” of the policy, adding: “We’re going to say more, but it’s incredibly important we provide dignity and security to older people on fixed incomes in the last decades of their life.”
But at the time Mr Farage suggested the policy was still under discussion. He said: ‘I haven’t changed my mind about the triple lock. It is still up for debate. Everything is up for debate.’
The policy is expected to cost the Treasury an additional £6bn a year when it rises by 4.8 per cent to £12,548 on Monday.