This chapter is divided into two parts of disparate length. The first is the shorter, and briefly reviews public attitudes towards state provision of retirement pensions, while the latter considers peoples’ responses to planning for their own pensions. The two topics may be reflexive. Support for state provision is strong, if tinged with scepticism about the government's commitment to maintaining generous pensions, while apathy and lack of forward planning typically characterise individuals’ approaches to ensuring financial security in old age. Both perspectives have helped to shape the current pattern of provision.

Ideologies of pension provision

It was apparent in Chapter 23 that pension policy in Britain has always been subject to continual review and revision. For seven decades policy sought to provide increasing financial support for ever larger numbers of pensioners within the constraints of financial probity. While Beveridge hoped to implement a fully-funded state pension scheme, political pressure demanded full benefits to be paid ahead of time. The compromise resulted in lower pensions and an unintentionally large role for means-tested supplementation, the reduction of which provided the motive of many subsequent reforms.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, pension reform was a topic of much political controversy. Conservative governments were keen to support the burgeoning pension industry, while the Labour party had aspirations to design a more fully comprehensive state scheme, modelled on the social insurance principles that underpinned the more generous provision being developed by social democratic governments in continental Europe.