An outrageous suggestion: Citizen's Pension - yet more money for women

If that worries them, they can always arrange a claw-back through the PAYE system, like they did with family allowances.

For centuries, old people were taken care of by their families, and the governments of the day didn't intervene. A pension was something granted by a lord or employer for long and faithful service (i.e. a form of patronage).

If people are sufficiently irresponsible that they won't make their own provisions for living when they cannot or will not work, and their families won't help them, why do you think the rest of us should have to take up the strain? State pensions are just one part of a tremendously corrosive system called the Welfare State, and the more we "guarantee" them, the more corrosive they become.

You've missed my point *again*. Maybe people think the means-tested benefits will continue to exist, maybe not, but they don't have much faith in the continuance of the current (or any) *level* of them. I would say that something similar actually applies to the current form of the state pension, and not just because of the noisy press coverage of the "pensions crisis".

That just means that people (including me) will have to work for more years before they retire. People live a lot longer than they used to when the pension systems were set up, so to rebalance the system, people should be working for longer.

Yes, that was my point. They will have faith in the "guaranteed" pension, while the current system's credibility is being eroded all the time. Since they have that faith, they won't save. They don't save now, with the current dodgy system, so a guaranteed system is not going to encourage saving.

Fine by me. I believe in some countries people are obliged to support their parents in retirement. Of course old people who never had children end up having a hard time. Whereas in this country they just sponge off the taxes of the younger generation they never contributed towards, and whinged about having to pay taxes to support when they were children.

Which way have means tested benefits gone over the years?

And the less children there are now, the longer people will have to work.

If you want a "save or starve" system, tough s*it, you're not going to get it. Face it.

The choice then remains between a predominantly means tested pension system, and a predominantly non means tested system. The "Citizen's Pension" moves sharply away from means testing by giving everyone a state pension at a level enough to live on, rather than simply increasing whatever other income they have to that level.

The "current dodgy system" is just as "guaranteed" as any new system. Anyone who immediately trusts a new system will be around for the next 100 years but has no faith in the current "minimum income guarantee" is a fool.

The current system penalises savings by handing out the most to those who have saved the least. The new proposal hands out the same to everyone. It means that everyone who pays the taxes to fund the system will benefit from it. It means that people won't get any small pension/savings effectively taken off them by means testing. It means that saving would actually be worth it.