State Pension Age
[ch 6: page 58]SPA is the earliest age at which you can claim your State Pension and depends on when you were born. SPA gradually rose to 65 for women in November 2018 (bringing women into line with men); and is rising from 65 to 66 for both men and women from December 2018 to October 2020.
A further increase in the SPA from 66 to 67 was brought forward by eight years under the Pensions Act 2014, to take place between April 2026 and April 2028. For people born after 5 April 1969 but before 6 April 1977, SPA is already 67.
An Independent Review of the SPA, led by former CBI chief John Cridland, looked at what should happen to the SPA after 2028 and recommended that it should rise to 68, seven years earlier than previously planned. In July 2017, the government proposed phasing this in between 2037 and 2039, rather than between 2044 and 2046. Cridland also recommended scrapping the triple-lock pensions guarantee (see page 59) (www.gov.uk/state-pension) and replacing it after 2020 with a simple link to earnings.
The UK is already on track to have the highest retirement age of OECD countries by 2060, according to the TUC. Its 2016 report, Postponing the pension: are we all working longer?, found that nearly half a million (436,000) workers within five years of state pension age had to leave the workplace for medical reasons.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/PostponingThePension.pdf