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There’s mounting financial pressure on the Government to end the triple lock on state pensions – under which they rise by the highest of three measures: inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent. If instead they had simply been linked to average earnings since the deal was implemented by the coalition government in 2011, the cost to taxpayers would now be around £16bn a year lower. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculated in 2025 that the additional annual cost would reach £15.5bn by 2029-30.

Looking forward, the problem is not so much the cost as the uncertainty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies made this point on Wednesday, saying that at some stage the triple lock will have to be reformed. “We estimate that by 2050 keeping the triple lock would, in expectation, cost around £20bn per year in today’s terms. But the high uncertainty means that, in fact, the cost could reasonably be anywhere between £5bn and £40bn per year.”

However, what critics of the triple lock rarely focus on is the benefits that older people bring to society. In 2022, a study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research calculated that retired over-65s provided £48bn a year in unpaid work. That’s equivalent to 2 per cent of GDP. So, since the state pension costs around 5 per cent of GDP, pensioners are already giving back to society somewhere between one-third and half the value of their pension – by working without any financial reward. That puts the extra cost of the triple lock into context.

Looked at another way, since unpaid work does not count as part of headline GDP figures. Retirement Villages Group, which commissioned the report, comments: “In the public perception, retired people are often portrayed as adding only limited value to our economy. This picture is biased and neglects the fact that retired people engage in a range of socially and economically valuable activities. However, these activities are often unpaid or otherwise informal, and therefore do not enter the calculations for economic output.”

For many families, the work of grandparents looking after children is crucial in enabling parents (it’s usually mothers) to stay in the workforce. The latest SunLife Grandparents Report asked grandparents about their contribution to childcare and found that 27 per cent reported that their children could not cope financially without their free help. In total, there are some seven million grandparents who provide childcare.

Volunteering has also boomed. More than half of over-65s in England – 4.9 million people – do some form of volunteering or civic engagement, and nearly 1.4 million over-65s in England and Wales provide unpaid care for their partner, family or others.

If you add the contribution from paid work to this, the total contribution of over-65s climbs further. Over the past quarter of a century, the rise in the number of older people at work has been quite astounding. Indeed, the number has quadrupled. The Office for National Statistics shows that in January to March 2001, there were around 411,000 people aged 65 or over in employment. By the end of 2010, it had more than doubled to 901,000. At the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic struck, it was 1,394,000, and the latest figure, for the three months to May this year, is 1,758,000.

These figures will inevitably have been affected by the increase in the state pension age, now 66, but put it this way: older people are a hard-working lot. Keeping the triple lock on pensions, looking after grandchildren, volunteering for charities – all the things they do – has not discouraged huge numbers of older people from deciding that they want to carry on working for money. And, of course, when they do that, they are also paying their way through income tax on their earnings and the national insurance contributions their employers make.

The whole debate about the triple lock is a narrow one. It’s all about the amount of money the Government can supposedly “save” by abandoning it. The vastly more important issue is how older people can contribute positively to society as a whole. It could be unpaid childcare, it could be family support, it could be – and increasingly is – a paid job.

So what the Government should be doing – and all those research groups should be studying – is not how to save a bit of money on pensions. Rather, it should be asking how to increase still further the massive and rising contribution that older people are already making to the economy and to our society as a whole. That surely makes more sense.

Need to know

One of the general principles in business is that you cut out failure and reinforce success. I remember talking with a company doctor, someone who was put in by creditors, using the bank, to rescue a company that was going bust and turn it around. How do you do it? I asked.

He explained that it was actually very simple. The first thing was to make sure you had enough capital to work with. So you would tell the people who had hired you that you needed however many millions it was to get you through – and ask for a bit more than you thought you would need, in case things went wrong. Then, nearly always, you could see some parts of the business that would never make money, or at least not enough to justify the capital investment. So you ideally sold them or, at worst, shut them down, using some of the spare capital to help staff that you had to make redundant. Then there were always parts that were doing all right and just needed some more money invested in them to do even better. So you boosted them with the funds you had secured, if necessary hiring new managers to do so. Then, three years later, the job would be done.

It made a big impression on me, particularly his confidence that nearly always the job could be done. I suspect he wouldn’t accept the task if it wasn’t doable. It struck me, while writing this column, that the Government should be applying the same principle to the issue of coping with an older society. It should treat as humanely as possible people who cannot work, those who need to spend time caring for people who might otherwise need to go into a home, those looking after grandchildren to let their parents work, and so on.

But it should also seek to reinforce positive social trends, and the top number there surely is this increase in employment of over-65-year-olds. We have managed to nearly quadruple the number in work this century, and to do so without significant government support. Some recent actions, including cutting the amount employers can pay part-time employees without having to make national insurance contribution payments, actually damage the process. Yet there are all sorts of barriers to work, not only for over-65s but for people from their late fifties onwards. At the moment, there are various not-for-profit enterprises seeking to help, including Brave Starts, which lists age-friendly employers. But it’s not really active Government policy, unlike under Theresa May, whose government did have a policy, details of which are here.

There are no simple answers here, but, as I say, when there is a social change on this scale already happening, it’s a wonderful opportunity. The Government would be pushing at an open door.