Mr. Paul Johnson:

I do not have that number to hand but there are several things going on there. As regards the impact of increasing the state pension age, we see that it has contributed to a reasonably significant increase in the number of women in work. The pension age for women has gone from 60 to 66, while for men it has gone from 65 to 66. Each year, one can see a significant increase in the number of people coming up to pension age who are in work, although that number is in the tens of thousands in context of the cohort of approximately 700,000 or 800,000. When the state pension age went up to 66, there were approximately 50,000 additional people in work. The behaviour of most people is not impacted. There are some whose behaviour is impacted but the majority of people are already out of the labour market by the time they get to 65. Certainly in the case of the most recent increase, particularly for men, the people most likely to have been persuaded to stay in work are the relatively low-paid. People who are highly paid are either able to retire early anyway or would have been in work in any case.

In terms of controlling the cost of pensions going forward, indexation is one method and the state pension age is clearly the other method. If the state pension age is increased in line with longevity, that has quite a big impact on the sustainability of the system going forward. Identifying the appropriate rate of increase is sort of a political, not just technocratic, question. One of the things we have certainly experienced in the UK is an astonishing increase in life expectancy in the past 40 years, with no increase in the State pension age before 2010 and, for men only a one-year increase in the state pension age despite something like a ten-year increase in longevity in that period. Thus far, not all of the gains, at least for men, have come in additional years in receipt of pension rather than any sort of sharing of that in terms of higher pension ages.