Former pensions minister Ros Altmann has warned against continually increasing the state pension age, urging the government to a consider a different "mechanism" for allocating state pension payments.
She said a "more considered approach" would focus on the retiree's length of working life and the number of years he or she had been making national insurance contributions.
"At the moment, the dice are all loaded in favour of the healthier and wealthier members of society, who get more state pension per year and for more years than other groups," she said.
Her comments were part of a response to John Cridland's interim report on the future of the state pension age, released today (13 October).
While the report made no recommendations, it floated a number of proposals, including replacing a universal state pension age with a "tailored" one, in a move to balance the challenges of increasing longevity with the need for fairness.
Baroness Altmann welcomed the report, saying Mr Cridland was "right to focus on the three pillars - affordability, fairness and fuller working lives".
However, she said the new state pension system was "increasingly seen as unfair".
"Under the new state pension, people can still get an increase of 5.8 per cent a year in state pension if they can afford to delay their start date.
"By contrast, people who desperately need their state pension before they reach state pension age cannot receive any money at all and state pension age has been rising sharply, as indeed has the age at which Pension Credit can start being paid to both men and women.
"This means the current system is penalising those who are in poor health, possibly due to having had very long working lives in physically demanding jobs."
She pointed out that, under the new system, people who work for more than 35 years do not gain any extra benefit. This, she said, disadvantaged people who enter the workforce at 16 against those who go to university.
She also said the national insurance system should make provisions for social care - something she claimed William Beveridge, the architect of the national insurance system in the 1940s, would have included had he foreseen the meteoric increase in life expectancy.
Steve Webb, Royal London's director of policy and Baroness Altmann's predecessor as pensions minister, also responded to the interim review, warning against making any changes to the universal state pension age.
He said: "Just at the point that the state pension is moving to a simpler flat rate system it is not time to complicate matters by having different pension ages for different people.
“It is true that people in different parts of the country and different occupations may have lower life expectancy and poorer health outcomes. But the right response to this is to tackle those health inequalities at source rather than to use the blunt instrument of the state pension to solve these wider social and economic problems.”
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: “We welcome today’s interim report on state pension age by John Cridland.
"His final report, due in spring 2017, will make recommendations to the government on future state pension age arrangements, with the key objectives of supporting affordability, fairness and fuller working lives for future generations.
“We encourage people to respond to John Cridland’s call for evidence and have their say on this very important issue.”
james.fernyhough@ft.com
