State pension rule change alert as MPs discuss retirement ages | Personal Finance | Finance

MPs have discussed changes to the state pension rules and how people can face different retirement ages. The state pension age will soon be increasing, moving up from April 2026.

You can currently claim your state pension when you reach the age of 66, but this is gradually moving up to 67 between April 2026 and April 2028. As the key change looms, the Work and Pensions Committee has been talking with policy experts about how this could impact people.

One key concern is that people may reach a point where they can no longer work, particularly in more physical jobs, but they still have several more years to wait to claim their state pension. The committee spoke to advocates about the challenges older workers face, and what extra support could be brought in for them.

The committee raised the suggestion of the Government providing more workplace support to the sectors it can “influence most directly”, such as health, social care and education. Jon Richards, assistant general secretary at public service union UNISON, said there are some discrepancies here.

He said: “If you compare ambulance workers to fire and police workers, they have different retirement ages. It’s very difficult for ambulance workers, even though they are manually handling all the time, all the day, more so than police and fire workers, yet they are not able to retire as early.”

Mr Richards said the union did a survey of ambulance workers asking what would help them stay in their role, and the top answer was a lower retirement age. Many NHS workers such as ambulance staff have a retirement age linked to the state pension age, which is set to increase again after the move to 67, to go up to 68 between April 2044 and 2046.

Some workers have the option to draw down reduced benefits from the age of 55, which is the age when you can access your private pensions. This age is increasing to 57 in April 2028.

Yet research by the GMB Union from 2024 found that 75 percent of ambulance workers who retired in 2023 did so before the age of 60. Meanwhile, the retirement age for many police and fire service staff is 60, although there may be an option for early access to your pension.

Mr Richards also said that work to improve support in the education sector sometimes overlooks some key workers here. He told the committee: “If you look at other sectors like education, the focus is always on teachers, professional workers, yet 50 percent of people in schools is support staff, cleaners, teaching assistants.”

He gave the example of a previous Department for Education study which looked at the mental health of teachers, and the plan was to apply the findings to teaching assistants and other school staff. Mr Richards said they had to inform the department that workers such as teaching assistants work “in a completely different way” to teachers.

The policy advocate was keen to bust another myth. He said: “You get this idea of public sector workers with their ‘gold-plated pensions’ and other things like that. I always say this, but the local Government pension scheme average pension is just over £5,000.”

State pension increase

State pensioners will get a welcome pay rise this April thanks to the triple lock. The metric guarantees payments rise in line with whichever is highest of three numbers: 2.5 percent, the rise in average earnings or the rate of inflation.

The earnings figure was the highest last year, with pay packets to increase 4.8 percent from April. This will lift the full new state pension from the current £230.25 a week to £241.30 a week, while the full basic state pension will go up from the current £176.45 a week to 184.90 a week.

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