Article #46816

One plan would see young workers offered early access to a slice of future pensions. It’s not perfect, but we need bold ideas

While we wait with nail-biting anxiety for the voters of Makerfield to decide the fate of the country, the prospect of renewal at the top provides a fertile time for breeding ideas and confronting great problems. Alan Milburn’s searing analysis of the first generation ever to do worse financially than their parents did at their age opens the door to people with solutions to this crisis. Now is the time to bring them out.

Among the thinktanks, voluntary sector and business organisations coming forward with ideas, this week the Social Market Foundation (SMF) is offering an inventive plan to help ease the growing inequality between those young people gifted some wealth and the majority who have none. We are now in the time of the “great wealth transfer”, with an estimated £5.5tn to be passed down by the baby boomer generation in the UK over the next three decades. My lucky generation had everything for free. Ordinary salaries bought homes easily and property values rocketed to make homeowners wealthy beyond all expectations, even as the UK has gotten relatively poorer compared to other European and North American countries.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist