Select committee: Work and Pensions Committee
Conclusion 5
2nd Report - Pensioner Poverty: challenges and mitigations
Published 24 Jul 2025
Addressed to Department for Work and Pensions
Work and Pensions Committee Pensioner Poverty: challenges and mitigations All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
As pensioners are generally on a fixed income, they face challenges responding to cost-of-living increases. Those on low incomes are likely to respond by cutting back on food, energy use and social interactions, adding to existing health risks. Various social and environmental risk factors such as poverty, bereavement and isolation and cold as well as lifestyle factors such as diet contribute to accelerating the ageing process, so-called frailty, reducing healthy life expectancy and the capacity to live independently. From this follows significant increased demand for health and social care services and increasingly grim health outcomes. Without a much greater focus on a whole system approach to prevention, tackling the factors that cause ill-health amongst pensioners, including poverty itself, the Government will not be able to achieve its goal of building a health and social care service that is sustainable for future generations. (Conclusion, Paragraph 41)
From: Work and Pensions Committee, 2nd Report - Pensioner Poverty: challenges and mitigations (HC 465), 24 July 2025
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 10 November 2025 (deadline 24 September 2025).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government's response commits to monitoring the gender pensions gap and to data-sharing reports to the Committee, but declines to monitor local authorities on benefit take-up or to change mixed-age couple conditionality.
- On the gender pensions gap, the government is "committed to monitoring" it and will "continue to seek to monitor and publish every 2 years", as the underlying survey data allow.
- On an Older People's Commissioner for England, the government says it "will consider" the experience and effectiveness of the Commissioner in Wales to inform its "future thinking in England".
- The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero "will write to the Committee by the end of 2025" with an assessment of the legislative changes needed to enable data sharing for bill support.
- On a Pension Credit taper, the government argues a taper "would introduce far greater complexity into the benefit". On mixed-age couples, it states there "are no plans to change or explore" the current requirement.