In December I stood for Shinfield Parish Council. I came fourth, nine votes behind Reform UK, ten ahead of Labour. I am 38, work full-time, and have two children under seven. My Conservative opponents—both elected—had advantages I could not match; but above all, the time to knock on doors while I was at work or putting children to bed.
This is not a complaint about my own result. It is a diagnosis of a system.
British local democracy has become structurally inaccessible to working parents. Borough councillors in Wokingham receive £7,784 annually—less than £150 a week—for what amounts to a part-time job, and that figure stays frozen because raising it looks bad to council tax payers struggling with the cost of living. The result is a vicious cycle: allowances remain too low for working families to afford public service, so only retirees, the self-employed, and the independently comfortable can stand. They are not villains. But they are, increasingly, the only candidates.
The Liberal Democrats should find this intolerable. A party forged in the fight to extend the franchise cannot be content with democratic structures that exclude a generation—and we should be honest that too often, we have learned to live with them. When democratic participation depends on wealth, age, or free time, it is no longer equally democratic at all.
The exclusion runs deeper than council chambers. Consider the basic economics of the British state.
Thirty-one percent of children live in poverty. Sixteen percent of pensioners do (DWP Households Below Average Income, 2023/24). Child poverty has barely moved in twenty years; pensioner poverty has halved. This is not accident. It is policy.
The triple lock guarantees pensions rise by the highest of inflation, wages, or 2.5%—a ratchet that costs £12 billion more annually than simple inflation-linked indexation (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2025). Workers over pension age pay no National Insurance, meaning two people with identical incomes are taxed at different rates purely because of age. Working-age benefits were frozen or uprated below inflation while pensions were protected. The gap in per-person government spending between pensioners and children has widened by 170 percent in two decades (Intergenerational Foundation).
None of this was designed as generational warfare. The triple lock was meant to lift pensioners from poverty, and it worked—no liberal wants to return to the days when the elderly froze in their homes. But policies that made sense as correctives have calcified into permanent advantage. A system built to protect vulnerable pensioners now benefits the comfortable alongside the struggling, while children in working families fall through widening cracks.
Liberalism has always been the creed of unfinished business. The Whigs broke aristocratic stranglehold on Parliament in 1832. Beveridge—a Liberal—designed the intellectual architecture of the welfare state. Mill made the philosophical case for women’s equality a generation before anyone listened. Each generation of liberals identified the barrier to human flourishing that their predecessors had tolerated, and worked to dismantle it—sometimes succeeding, sometimes laying foundations others would build upon.
The barrier now is generational. Not because older people are enemies—many are horrified that their grandchildren cannot afford homes—but because a system has drifted into arrangements that serve the already-secure at the expense of the still-striving.
The liberal principle is simple: equal treatment. Of income sources, yes. But also of generations. That means planning reform that allows homes to be built where they are needed. It means local government structures that do not accidentally exclude working parents. At minimum, councillor allowances must be high enough to make public service feasible for working families—not as a perk, but as an access requirement, no different in principle from wheelchair ramps or parental leave. It means recognising that a working father in Shinfield, and a grandmother in the same parish, both deserve a system that lets them participate and thrive.
Reform UK offers scapegoats. The Conservatives offer continuity with the drift that caused this. Labour offers managerialism dressed as change—tweaking delivery without confronting the underlying distributional bias.
Liberals should offer something harder: an honest accounting of how we got here, and the political will to fix it.
If the party of Keynes and Beveridge and Lloyd George cannot make the case for intergenerational fairness, who can?
* Dominic Rider is a Liberal Democrat activist in Shinfield, Wokingham. He has previously stood for local council. He used Claude AI as a drafting and research tool.
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17 Comments
The author argues for a return to an inflation-only link for the State Pension, yet it was Margaret Thatcher’s breaking of the link with average earnings back at the beginning of her first administration that led to the rise in pensioner poverty which was only finally reversed by the introduction of the triple-lock, because poverty is measured relative to median earnings, not inflation. If we consider that the State Pension is now adequate in these terms (and this is a discussion that the Party has not yet had) then it should be indexed in line with median earnings. We should not be reducing generational inequality by making pensioners poorer as Thatcher did.
We need to the the party of bringing back britain- not the ethnostate that the far-right champions- but that caring, close-knit, community-minded britain that helped forge the modern state – the institutions that were forged in the post-war ruins are decaying and stagnating – and this includes the very community itself.
Lawrence, you’re right, and I accept the correction. Poverty is measured relative to median earnings, so CPI-linking would gradually push pensioners below the poverty line even if their purchasing power held steady.
I refer to CPI linking to protect against inflationary shocks like 2022, when prices rose faster than wages. Since 2008, that’s actually been the more common pattern — real wages have barely grown. But over the longer term, earnings do tend to outpace prices, and the poverty measure follows earnings. Thank you for the pushback.
Bring back, “a caring, close-knit, community-minded Britain”, Sarah ?
Yes, to a point, Sarah, but no more leaving school to go down the pit at 12 as my Granddad did, or being badly shell shocked in the trenches in 1916 as my Gt Uncle was, or dying far too young from stress incurred in the RAF in WW2 as my Dad was. No thanks to any of that……. or being divided at 11 at school as some of my contemporaries were.
Yes, I remember a community minded society……. but it wasn’t all beer and skittles when some of its outcomes, such as the trade unions, were sniffed at by the middle classes of Middle England…… and still are.
Worth looking up this on You Tube for a good old perspective and sing song :
Jarrow Song Alan Price ‧ 1974
@Dominic – I’m so sorry you felt unsupported in your election campaign.
In practice a large number of councillors are working parents with all the demands that life brings. But they can only manage both the election campaigning, and then being an effective councillor, if they have a team behind them. It is very difficult to win a seat if you are the only campaigner.
I write this from experience with both my husband and me on the council whilst working and bringing up our family. I also looked after the recruitment, approval and selection of candidates in Kingston for many years, and we have been proud of the diversity of our candidates/councillors across age as well as the other dimensions.
It’s also important to campaign in your area for family friendly practices – evening meetings, term time meetings only and childcare allowances.
Mary, apologies if the piece came across as showing a lack of support. I actually felt well supported, but I felt I was unable to run a strong enough campaign mainly because of time constraints on my own part.
I am aware that some members of my borough council work full-time and also have children, I have a lot of respect for them and genuinely do not know how they juggle it all. I think it’s important to state that there really is a barrier to entering civic politics these days, particularly for Borough or County.
Is there a way for your council to share those inclusive policies that you championed during your time there with others?
The idea of a us having “…democratic structures that exclude a generation…” is a gross oversimplification of the complexities of life and solutions are not as straightforward as this article suggests.
I understand that a parent with young children will have less opportunity to go door knocking than someone of who family has grown up and left home, but they also have less opportunity to go door knocking than someone of the same age, sex, employment but without children.
The issue, therefore, is not about age but about other commitments that mean some people have less time to go door knocking. I would add another example – who has more time to go door knocking: a younger person without family responsibilities or someone who may be retired but has almost full-time caring responsibilities for an elderly mother or father?
Mary you are right to mention team work but there are an increasing number of jobs that demand so much time over certain periods that it makes being a conscientious councillor very difficult. I remember when I was a head of department at school and then college, I worked at least 60hrs per week during term time and had a family; I became a councillor after I had been made redundant from that position and chose to be ‘just a teacher’ and also had 2 fellow lib dem cllrs for the same ward, both of whom were not employed or only part time. Without that arrangement and while i was a head of department, I would not have been able to meet the demands of both council and residents.
Perhaps I should quality my above comment a little. Before opting out of a senior educational role i might have been able to be in the role of councillor but I would not have lived up to the Lib Dem mantra ‘working for you all year round’ and would probably have been like some councillors I knew in all parties who did less for their residents and sooner of later lost their seats. One I knew resigned due to being unable to cope with the work load.
yet another issue is the need to meet with council officers, which is almost impossible if you have a full-time job without any spare time during the working hours of officers.
Joan, you’re absolutely right, I completely missed that perspective.
@Nigel Jones, @Dominic Rider – It is possible to get round these problems, but the Catch 22 is that you may have to be in control to bring about the changes, unless you manage to persuade other parties.
In Kingston is widely accepted that meetings with senior officers have to be held in twilight hours. All formal Council meetings are held in the evenings and only in term time. We brought in allowances for people who had caring responsibilities (both for children and other family members) and recognised maternity leave.
I admit that it is certainly challenging to be in full-time work and to also hold a portfolio, but being a ward councillor does seem to work – when first elected I too was a head of section in a college. These days a lot of casework is done by email so is not constrained to 9 to 5.
Of course it is demanding. As a councillor I pretty well had to give up all my other leisure interests (apart from singing once a week, which kept me sane). But that wasn’t a sacrifice as I really enjoyed it.
However when I was recruiting potential candidates I always made sure we looked seriously at time commitments to make sure they were being realistic about the demands.
Dominic is right. We retirees do a great job as councillors (ha ha!! I would say that) but it is no way to fun local government. I could not have done it while working, even when my daughte left home. We went to do sessions in scholls and were asked ‘why are you all so old!!’ I am not here with any solutions. Guaranteed sabaticals? Proper pay?
Good to see support for “planning reform that allows homes to be built where they are needed.”
“Poverty is measured relative to median earnings, so CPI-linking would gradually push pensioners below the poverty line even if their purchasing power held steady.”
Excuse me if my maths is all up in the air, but, if poverty is measured relative to median income, doesn’t that mean that if Elon Musk decides to up and move to the UK that overnight the number of people in poverty would go through the roof?
If so, then it seems that there’s something a bit off in the way poverty is measured.
Not that I’d welcome Elon’s moving here, but that’s for different reasons.
“doesn’t that mean that if Elon Musk decides to up and move to the UK that overnight the number of people in poverty would go through the roof?”
No. Median income would probably remain unchanged or rise by 0.5p. Mean income might go up by rather more.
@Adam
You’re right though that “something a bit off in the way poverty is measured”. A hollowing out of the income distribution where top end incomes rose and middle incomes fell would see the median fall and take millions out of “poverty”.