The Centre for a Better Britain is stealing retirement security behind an unpaid fiscal plan.
Its 183-page report calls for abolishing the state pension, cutting taxes by £75 billion, and replacing public retirement income with lifetime investment accounts. At a Tuesday briefing, founder Jonathan Brown described the state pension as “essentially a Ponzi scheme.” The phrase is precise enough to be wrong and provocative enough to be useful — which is usually the mark of a political intervention, not an actuarial analysis.
The state pension is forecast to cost the public purse £146.1 billion in 2025–26, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. Current revenues finance current pension payments. That creates a real demographic problem as the ratio of workers to retirees changes. It does not make the system a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a fraud in which new investor money is paid out as returns while the operator conceals the absence of genuine underlying revenue. The state pension is a publicly authorized transfer system whose costs and rules are set through Parliament. The two have approximately nothing in common except that newer participants help finance benefits for existing participants, which is also how insurance and public debt work.
Brown’s framing converts a demographic-transition problem into a moral indictment of the system itself. That is the necessary precondition for abolishing it. The word is not an analysis of pension finance. It is the political sales pitch for replacing a public insurance system with a private accumulation system.
The report proposes a lifetime investment account seeded with £1,000 at birth. Account holders could contribute up to 15% of earnings over their working lives. The state pension would remain only as a means-tested safety net for people unable to build an adequate private pot. The concept is straightforward. The transition is not. A personal account can accumulate assets for a newborn; it cannot pay next year’s pension to someone who has already retired.
The people who bear that transition are identifiable. Current retirees would need their existing payments protected while the system that finances them was being dismantled. Workers within 10 or 20 years of retirement would face the sharpest break between the contributions and expectations built under the old system and the account they were suddenly told to fund. Middle earners would be required to divert as much as 15% of earnings into a private pot while earning too much to qualify for a meaningful means-tested payment, but not enough to guarantee an adequate retirement after housing, care, and employment risks. A means-tested safety net is not a replacement for an earned public pension. In practice, it requires an assessment of income and assets, repeated applications, administrative proof, and the possibility that a household just above the threshold receives little or nothing. The risk moves from the state to the individual. The report does not show that the individual can carry it.
CFABB calls for abolishing capital gains tax and inheritance tax, scrapping stamp duty on property and shares, eliminating the digital services tax and air passenger duty, and reducing corporation tax from 25% to 15% over eight years. The argument is that these taxes discourage investment, business succession, property transactions, and international competitiveness. Those are conventional supply-side claims. They are debatable on their own terms. They are not revenue offsets merely because they are described as growth policy.
The report states that its tax reductions must be matched by spending cuts to avoid what it calls a “Liz Truss-style market meltdown.” It identifies possible savings, including closing the public pension plan to new teachers and civil servants and eradicating the state pension. It does not specify how the remaining reductions would be distributed across the £75 billion package. That is not a minor omission. It is the entire question.
The missing offsets are not abstract numbers. They would have to come from identifiable public functions: NHS services, local-government grants and care provision, or the Department for Work and Pensions itself. Cutting the NHS means fewer services, lower staffing, or longer waits. Cutting local government means less capacity for social care, housing support, transport, and other services that older and working households use. Cutting DWP administration means asking the same department to assess more complex means-tested claims with fewer resources. A programme that promises tax cuts and pension replacement while leaving these choices unnamed has not solved the fiscal problem. It has moved the bill into envelopes marked “someone else.”
The political infrastructure is also part of the record. CFABB operates from Millbank Tower near Reform UK’s headquarters. Its founder previously served as Reform UK’s chief operations officer, and James Orr previously served as the thinktank’s advisory-board chair before joining Reform as its head of policy. Orr later stepped down from the thinktank role and was suspended by Reform after an undercover investigation concerning foreign donations; he denies wrongdoing. The report’s authors say Reform did not review the work, and the organisation’s funding is unclear. Formal party authorship is not required for a policy document to occupy a party-adjacent political space.
The report is right about one narrow point: a state pension financed through current revenues is exposed to demographic change and political choices. That vulnerability requires honest options — higher revenue, later retirement, altered benefits, more immigration, higher productivity, or a mixed retirement system that adds private saving without abandoning public insurance. Calling the existing arrangement fraudulent avoids the harder task of pricing those options.
The most consequential number in the document is not the £1,000 seed, the 15% contribution ceiling, or the proposed corporation-tax rate. It is the £75 billion in unspecified offsets, alongside the unpriced transition for retirees and near-retirees. Current pensioners cannot be paid in rhetoric. The NHS, local government, and the DWP cannot be financed by omission. The report supplies a destination and leaves the fare to be collected from people it does not name. That is not reform. It is extraction under a pension label.