Pensions, from 2027 will take three months longer, but not for everyone: here is who will be saved

The partial and gradual brake that the government intends to pull on the updating of social security requirements to life expectancy will focus on precocious workers and those who carry out usurious activities. The indication is back in the majority resolution on the plan of accounts, approved yesterday in the House and in the Senate with the same text. The stop will be in two stages: in 2027 one of the three months of increase provided by the mechanism should be sterilised, and the following year a second stage will intervene with another stop of one or both months remaining.

Work on the precise definition of the measure and the group to which it is to be applied is in progress, with technicians engaged in constructing solutions capable of holding together the objective of protecting the workers deemed most 'deserving' of tailor-made treatment and the need not to weigh too heavily on the delicate balances of the manoeuvre. In practice, this is a parallel construction site to that on the scrappage scheme, which on different terrain is guided by the same principle (see the article opposite). The Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti gave similar consideration to the two dossiers in the hearing held on Wednesday evening before the Budget commissions, and in both cases he referred to the concept of the 'deserving' to indicate the criterion that will draw the boundaries of the two measures.

Giorgetti, in fact, led the mediation that was indispensable to include this social security chapter in the manoeuvre's grid. According to those present, FdI and Forza Italia were opposed to the intervention at the majority summit, and in particular the Azzurri insisted on concentrating all the resources on the Irpef cut to extend the second bracket up to incomes of 60,000 euro. But the move, with its approximately 2.5 billion euro annual cost, would in any case have exceeded the budget foreseen for social security.

As in all mediations, everyone has had to give up something, starting with the League, which has beaten the proposal for a full stop to the linking of life expectancy: a hypothesis, however, that soon turned out to be incompatible with budget margins. Because what matters is not so much the punctual impact on 2027 and 2028, when the margins widen a little, but the prospective effects of a total freeze, which according to the calculations of the General Accounting Office "would lead to an increase in the debt/GDP ratio of about 15 points to 2045 and about 30 points to 2070" (latest Rgs report on social security and health expenditure).

It was this aspect that complicated the never-ending debate around the automatic adjustment of pension requirements to life expectancy, usually attributed by the public debate to the Fornero reform of 2011 but actually introduced by the last Berlusconi government with the anti-crisis decrees of 2009 (Decree-Law 78/2009, Article 22-ter) and 2010 (Decree-Law 78/2010, Article 12). In 2019 the mechanism was blocked by the Conte 1 government with the decree on 'quota 100' (Decree-Law 4/2019), and in 2027 it will therefore be back in force after eight years. For many, but not for all.