The government is spending an extra £31 billion every year in this parliament to protect the state pension triple lock.
This is potentially misleading. Annual spending on the state pension is projected to increase by £31 billion by the end of this parliament. So the amount spent annually compared to 2024/25 is only forecast to rise by £31 billion over a five-year period.
In a post on Instagram on 7 April, culture secretary Lisa Nandy claimed that Labour is “spending an extra £31 billion every year in this Parliament to protect the pension triple lock”.
The pensions minister Torsten Bell appeared to make a similar claim on X (formerly Twitter) the day before, saying that the government was spending “an extra £31bn every year to protect the triple lock throughout this parliament”.
These claims are potentially misleading, and Mr Bell’s appears to have caused confusion on social media, with some querying the figure and a community note added to his post.
Annual spending on the state pension is set to increase by £31 billion compared to the last financial year, but only by the end of this parliament. So the figure represents the total rise in annual spending over a five-year period, from 2024/25 to 2029/30.
Mr Bell’s post was part of a thread which included a link to an opinion column in the Daily Express, in which he correctly claimed that Labour is “set to increase spending on the State Pension by around £31 billion a year by the end of this Parliament”.
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The ‘triple lock’ means the basic and new state pensions are uprated every year by the highest of earnings growth, inflation or 2.5%.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast last month that annual spending on state pensions will rise from £137.8 billion in 2024/25 to £168.7 billion in 2029/30—an increase of £30.9 billion.
But this increase is only forecast to happen over a five-year period. The increase each year compared to the previous year will be less, as will the increase compared to 2024/25 in every year prior to 2029/30.
For example, in 2025/26 it’s projected that £145.6 billion will be spent—an increase of £16.8 billion on 2024/25. And in 2026/27 £153.2 billion is set to be spent, an increase of £7.6 billion on the previous year and £15.4 billion compared to 2024/25.
The OBR has also forecast that overall “pensioner spending”, which includes state pensions but also other forms of support including pension credit, pensioner housing benefit and the winter fuel payment, will increase from £150.7 billion in 2024/25 to £181.8 billion in 2029/30—an increase of £31.1 billion.
It’s also worth noting that while both Ms Nandy and Mr Bell described the £31 billion increase in state pension spending as being to “protect” the triple lock, there are various different factors driving the spending increase.
Heidi Karjalainen, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Full Fact: “It’s true that spending on the state pension will rise by £31 billion in nominal terms between 2024/25 and 2029/30. But that increase is the result of a combination of factors—more pensioners, more people entitled to the full or nearly full new state pension, and also the triple lock.”
When we contacted the Department for Work and Pensions about Mr Bell’s claim it declined to offer a correction, saying his X post was a summary of the Express article he had linked to earlier in the same thread (which referenced the figure correctly). When asked about Ms Nandy’s claim, the Department for Culture, Media & Sport told us that it was a question for the Labour party. We’ve contacted the Labour party and will update this article if we receive a response.
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