What do us pensioners actually stand to lose if the triple lock is ditched and what do we gain instead? - David Behrens

It’s hardly in doubt that political debate has dumbed down in recent years. The dubious art of reducing complex ideas to game show catchphrases has become the first recourse of politicians who think we’re incapable of taking in more than three words at a time. Get Brexit Done. Take Back Control. Points Mean Prizes.

But soundbites like those have a habit of coming back to bite you in the leg. It wasn’t Andy Burnham, nor indeed Labour, who appropriated the phrase Triple Lock from an old double glazing advert, but it is around his neck that the words now hang like a millstone.

In fact it was the Tory-Lib Dem coalition that introduced the idea in 2010 as a three-way protection for the state pension against the cost of living. That same administration, you will remember, also brought in student loans that would keep you in debt until your pension kicked in. So what they gave out with a teaspoon they took back with a shovel.

Nevertheless, the triple lock has become a totem for pensioners’ rights: mess with that and you risk insulting the 19 per cent of the population who draw it. That, at any rate, seems to be the consensus among commentators who are still quite a long way off doing so.

But speaking as part of that demographic (yes, it’s a few years since they took the picture below) I’m less concerned about losing the triple lock than I am about giving up everything else.

Let’s do the maths: on current estimates, next year’s rise in triple-locked pensions for people my age will be £9.40 a week. Under Burnham’s proposals, it would be around £3 less. But personal care, if and when it is eventually needed, would come free. It’s the teaspoon-and-shovel analogy in reverse.

Under the present system, you get the care you can afford, and no-one can afford it for long. A relative of mine is being charged £1,800 a week right now for his dementia care and the state will not step in until it has made a pauper of him. He is a dignified man but dignity in old age is hard to find in today’s Britain.

More than 13 million of us are facing the prospect of an imminent future like his and every family has a story of its own. None has a happy ending.

That’s why, when you look beyond the catchphrases, this week’s announcement is so much more palatable than the one two years ago when Keir Starmer’s administration at a stroke removed the pensioners’ winter fuel payment and handed the money to striking train drivers who promptly went on strike again.

Ironically, some of the money would eventually have trickled back into our pensions because one of the purposes of the triple lock was to keep pace with the earnings of others. In that year of 2024, wages went up by 8.5 per cent so pensions did, too. But it was a false flag because more pensioners found themselves suddenly paying income tax.

In Burnham’s world, pensions will continue to rise with the cost of living – so what’s the difference? £3.70 a week, that’s what. That’s all anyone would lose. Even in a ‘wage boom’ year like 2024, the removal of the triple lock would be worth no more than a pint of beer. Yet it would bring with it free care in your house, not the poorhouse.

The Conservatives, too, have recognised the need for change, despite their knee-jerk reaction to Burnham’s announcement. When Mel Stride was Shadow Chancellor he said the present system was mathematically unsustainable and could not last forever.

By this summer he had changed his tune, though, writing that the triple lock was “not some Westminster gimmick” but was about “security and dignity for people who worked hard all their lives”.

He was entirely wrong. A gimmick is precisely what it is.

It will cost the country £50bn a year by 2050, money which could be spent instead on a national social care service, and far from preserving self-respect it drowns it in the palliative of a pint a week.

Mel Stride was sacked from the shadow cabinet after his volte-face and his party today seems stuck on the fence.

Its chairman, the Yorkshire MP Kevin Hollinrake, said on Wednesday that keeping the triple lock was “our plan today”. That means it won’t be tomorrow.

Nor should it be because what age brings more than anything is uncertainty – and that’s not something a glib slogan can allay.

The security of knowing that you can see out your life without liquidating your family, on the other hand, is a legitimate ambition that should not be beyond the imagination of politicians – at least not those who can express themselves in more than three words.