Pensions - Articles - Pensioners hold breath as COVID may still impact pensions

 Steven Cameron, Pensions Director at Aegon comments: “While today’s figures showed that consumer price inflation rose to 1 per cent for the year to July from 0.6 per cent the previous month*, the impact of COVID-19 and lockdown measures restricting what we can spend money on is making it hard to predict inflation figures month on month.

 “The coming months’ figures are critical for pensioners though as public sector pension increases are based on CPI figures to September published in October and there’s an expectation inflation will nose dive, with the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report outlining it may drop to minus 0.3 per cent** for the year to August.

 “State pensions increase by the triple lock (the highest of price inflation, earnings growth or 2.5%) and again, it’s the September inflation figure published in October which is used here. If both inflation and earnings growth are particularly low or even negative, the underlying 2.5% guaranteed increase will come at a significant cost to the Government on top of their other COVID-19 bailout measures and put significant pressure on the future of the triple lock. While a bigger inflation increase compared to last month may raise hopes, pensioners will need to hold their breath to find out what future months hold in store.”

 
 *https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/d7g7/mm23
 **https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/monetary-policy-report/2020/august/monetary-policy-report-august-2020