How many working-age adults there are for each person over 65, what the tax take is doing, and what the parties with costed documents propose.
Working-age adults (16 to 64) per person aged 65 and over, 2001 to 2024. Every state pension, and most health and social care spending, is paid out of the taxes of the people in the first group. That ratio is the tax base.
National accounts taxes, £bn, from the OBR public finances databank. The dashed section is the OBR’s forecast, not an outturn.
Quoted from their own documents. Both parties with costed papers are shown.
An end to the hostile environment. An end to the minimum income requirements for spouses of those holding work visas. Safe routes to sanctuary for those fleeing danger, persecution and war. [...] Green MPs would campaign to abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition [...] We would also campaign to abolish the ten-year route to settlement [...] Those seeking asylum and protection to be permitted to work while their application is being decided.
Not costed. The manifesto's Statistical Appendix has no immigration line, so these measures are not attributed a cost or a saving anywhere in the document.
restrict all working-age benefits to British citizens only, with no access for temporary visa holders, those with Indefinite Leave to Remain, or illegal migrants. [...] non-citizens will be charged at market rates [for the NHS]. [...] Those here on temporary visas or Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) will be denied any recourse to public funds.
Not separately costed. The document folds it into the £70-80bn a year it attributes to the full range of working-age benefit changes, so no figure is attributable to the citizenship restriction on its own.
Neither party attaches a figure to its immigration policy. Restore Britain folds the benefit restriction into a wider working-age benefits total, so nothing is attributable to the citizenship condition on its own. The Green manifesto’s costings appendix has no immigration line at all. That is a finding about the documents, not a gap in the transcription.
The full set of costed claims from both parties is at Policy Claims. Underlying area data at National Demographics.
2001 to 2024
The working-age population grew 15.2% over this period. The population over 65 grew 39.2%. That is the whole of it: the ratio fell from 4.07 to 3.37 because the second group grew faster than the first.
These two series are deliberately not divided by one another. The OBR revenue figures are UK-wide. The population data here covers 329 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales, with no Northern Ireland. A revenue-per-worker figure built from them would be silently overstated by roughly the Northern Irish share, and would look perfectly authoritative while being wrong.