Labour’s manifesto commitment to keep the triple lock for the length of this Parliament functioned as a class compromise, made under the assumption that growth would keep the arithmetic workable. In April 2025 that arithmetic produced a 4.8% rise, worth up to £575 a year, with ministers projecting pensioner incomes up by £2,100 over the Parliament (gov.uk/government/news/…), and the pledge was repeated in the Lords as recently as January 2025 (hansard.parliament.uk/l…). None of that answers the question the OECD is actually putting to Labour, which is not whether pensioners deserve the money but whether the state can afford to keep promising it without finding the sum somewhere else in a Budget that, by most accounts, has very little room left to give.

The OBR has already found the policy has cost three times what was projected (theguardian.com/busines…), and that figure will do a great deal of work at the next spending review. Not in the direction of the 8.7 million pensioners still on the old basic pension rather than the new one. The National Pensioners Convention has been saying this for over a year: two-thirds of the headlines about a “boost” describe a rise that only a third of pensioners receive in full, and the personal allowance frozen at £12,570 until 2028 means the boost pushes some of the rest into paying tax on an income that was never generous to begin with. Brian Sturtevant’s phrase for it, a choice between heating and eating, is not rhetoric (npcuk.org/post/don-t-be…).

UNITE has done more than defend the number. Its 2024 “Decent Retirement for All” manifesto did not stop at the triple lock; it named the pension age itself as the next fight, and folded in the WASPI women’s compensation claim and a demand to reopen defined-benefit schemes most employers spent two decades quietly closing (unitetheunion.org/news-…). The union’s own petition gathered over 20,000 signatures and directed members straight to the NPC’s template letter (megaphone.org.uk/petiti…), and conference passed an emergency motion for a “vigorous campaign” run jointly with the NPC, the Scottish Pensioners’ Forum, the TUC and the Labour Party (uniterankandfile.org). The 68 is Too Late campaign, run with the same allies, handed in over 36,000 signatures at two different parliaments in May 2023 (unitetheunion.org/why-j…, scottishpensioners.org.…). This is a united front worth naming as such: unions and pensioners’ organisations against a Treasury logic that treats the retirement age as a variable to be adjusted rather than a settlement to be defended.

The obvious reading is that defending the triple lock is the whole fight, that if Labour holds the line the argument is won. But that is not quite right either. The formula itself, whichever of three measures happens to be highest in a given year, was built to survive one government’s arithmetic, not to answer what a pension should actually buy. A basic pension that was inadequate before 2016 does not become adequate because it now tracks earnings more reliably.

UNITE’s own demand to lower the pension age concedes this: the fight turns on how much of the social product goes to people who no longer sell their labour, and no single formula, however fiercely defended, was ever going to settle that question on its own.

Whether the coming spending review tests Labour’s manifesto commitment is, at this point, close to a formality. The more interesting question is what happens to the pension-age fight once the triple lock survives, assuming it does, and the OBR’s number is still sitting there, unspent and waiting for someone in the Treasury to decide where it goes next.