UK PM Burnham has been warned by one of Britain’s largest unions that scrapping the triple lock on state pensions to help fund free social care for the elderly would be “electoral suicide” amid growing cabinet splits, reports The Times

The pattern in past debates of this kind is that leaks and union warnings of this sort tend to kill or dilute proposals before they reach a formal announcement, making early signalling a reasonable proxy for the eventual policy path. The fiscal channel is the relevant one for gilts: scrapping or diluting the lock would marginally slow the growth of a large and rising transfer line, while funding universal free social care would add a permanent spending commitment, so the net direction for the deficit depends on which half of the trade actually survives. Cabinet splits of this kind have in previous episodes produced extended briefing wars and delayed decisions rather than clean resolutions, which tends to leave the fiscal trajectory unpriced either way. What is worth watching is whether the proposal appears in an official fiscal event or is quietly dropped, and whether OBR costings ever take account of it. For now this is a press report of internal dissent, not policy, and the historical base rate is for the status quo on the lock to hold.