UK triple lock to stay until next election but no promise post-2029

The UK pensions triple lock will stay in place until at least the next election, a Cabinet minister has said.

Wes Streeting said the Labour Party is standing by its manifesto pledges from 2024, which included a promise to "retain the triple lock for the state pension".

But he declined to say whether the guarantee – to increase state pensions each year by either earnings growth, CPI, consumer price index, inflation or 2.5%, whichever is highest – will feature in his party's next manifesto.

The Defence secretary faced questions on Monday about how the government would pay for a National Health Service-style social care system, which Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he wants to set up after the next general election.

Asked whether it was "right to look at the triple lock" amid efforts to fund social care and also an increase in defence spending, Streeting told Sky News: "The manifesto was clear on this – we're committed to the triple lock.

"And Andy Burnham has been clear that we are standing by our manifesto, so I hope that's clear."

Streeting had earlier told Times Radio he was not prepared to say whether the triple lock would continue under a future Labour government.

"I'm not going to write the next manifesto on your radio programme," he said.

He added: "Let's see if we can command a national consensus that means that at the next election, the parties that try and play politics with the funding of this issue are the ones that are punished and the parties who've got real solutions are the ones that are rewarded."

A care service which, like the NHS, is free at the point of use could cost up to £18.5 billion a year in 2035/6, the Health Foundation think tank has estimated.

Asked on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme whether he planned to set up the service free at the point of use, Burnham replied: "Yes."

He said that when he draws up his proposal in full, he would give a "precise explanation as to how it's going to be funded".

He said "nothing is off the table at this moment in time" to fund the new care service model.

Burnham also said: "People are paying care charges now. They are spending tens of thousands of pounds from their savings, sometimes losing their homes.

"That is what's happening at the moment."

He told the broadcaster he wanted to set out his "vision" for social care in his Labour Party conference speech on Tuesday.

James Murray, the former health & social care secretary who is now a Treasury minister, told the Press Association: "What Andy has set out is the fact that social care needs to be reformed, and politicians have been talking about social care for years, decades.

"But it's one of those big challenges we all know we face, but politicians haven't confronted or fixed."

He added: "I know that the fact that social care is not where it should be has impact on families and on the NHS.

"It puts a lot more pressure on our NHS, so I think fixing social care is something, a problem, whose time is long overdue to be fixed.

"And Andy is saying that he's the prime minister, we're the party – we're the government – to take that on."

Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith said while his Conservative party was "committed" to participating in cross-party talks to reform social care, "sooner or later, a government has to make choices".

He told Sky News: "At a time when our debt burden is at a record high, we're paying the highest rates for government borrowing for 28 years, and the tax burden is simultaneously at an all-time peacetime high, we do as Conservatives say that this isn't a problem you can just solve by throwing more taxpayers' money at it."

And Keir Starmer's chief secretary Darren Jones, who left the Cabinet table when Burnham swept into No 10 earlier this year, has cast doubt over the future of the triple lock.

He told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: "Maybe, you know, the triple lock is very expensive in the years ahead and it's a benefit to older people – if you're reallocating money to help older people in the social care system, maybe there's some reform that could be made there."

The Labour MP said scrapping the triple lock was an "option that the government should consider – alongside others".

Chancellor John Healey is expected to say more about Labour's economic plans later on Monday, pledging a "new age of industrialisation".

He will confirm that three new floating docks at HM Naval Base Clyde in Faslane, Scotland, will be procured through a UK-only competition.

Streeting said he and Healey were "choosing through actions, not just words, to back Britain by buying British".

He continued: "We know that we needed new floating dock facilities up on the Clyde.

"Previously, the default option would have been to go out to tender across the world and potentially see billions of pounds of taxpayers' money and jobs in shipbuilding go elsewhere.

"That's not the political choice we're making today."

By Will Meakin-Durrant and David Hughes, Press Association Political Staff

Press Association: News

source: PA

Copyright 2026 Alliance News Ltd. All Rights Reserved.