A decade of hard-won progress on pensioner poverty has gone into reverse, with the single pensioner poverty rise now most acute among divorced women and those who never married, according to fresh research from consultancy LCP. For anyone building a retirement income strategy, the data is a reminder that household structure is not a peripheral detail: it is central to sequencing risk and income adequacy.
What the LCP Data Shows
LCP’s paper draws on a previously unpublished breakdown of official Department for Work and Pensions data. It reveals that overall pensioner poverty climbed from 15.7% in 2012/13 to 18.6% in 2023/24, reversing a long run of improvement. The research identifies single retirees as the cohort bearing the heaviest burden of that reversal, with divorced women and those who have never married facing the steepest rise in financial hardship.
The scale of the demographic shift behind this matters. According to FTAdviser, the total number of single pensioners in England and Wales who are divorced has trebled since 2002, rising by more than one million to 1.5 million in 2024. A cohort that was once relatively small has become large enough to move aggregate poverty figures in a material way. That structural change took decades to accumulate; it will not reverse quickly.
Angela Staral, chief operating officer for People’s Pension, put it plainly: ‘Ensuring that pension assets are appropriately considered when relationships end could play an important role in reducing gender-based inequalities in retirement income.’ For advisers and planners, that is a direct prompt to review how pension-sharing orders feature in divorce proceedings for clients approaching retirement age.
The Single Pensioner Poverty Rise in a Portfolio Context
From a wealth-management perspective, single-pensioner finances present a specific risk profile. There is no second income to smooth a bad sequence of returns in the early years of drawdown, no partner’s state pension to fall back on, and no shared household cost base to cushion spending shocks. The LCP findings on the single pensioner poverty rise reinforce why income reliability, rather than yield maximisation, should be the organising principle for a single retiree’s portfolio.
A diversified, income-oriented allocation, balancing annuity income, drawdown from a SIPP or personal pension, and reliable dividend-paying equity holdings, can help mitigate the sequence-of-returns risk that hits single households hardest. Capital preservation matters more when there is no fallback. The downside scenario is stark: a market drawdown in the first three to five years of retirement, combined with rising essential costs, can permanently impair a single retiree’s income base in a way that a two-income household can often absorb.
The cost-of-living pressure compounding this is real and current. ONS data shows that 56% of UK adults reported that their cost of living had increased compared with a month earlier, with 94% of those affected citing food shopping costs and 68% pointing to fuel. For a single pensioner on a fixed income, with no partner’s earnings to flex, these numbers translate directly into portfolio withdrawal rates that were not modelled at the outset of retirement.
On wealth transfer, separate data cited by adviser Gillian Hepburn points to HMRC figures from 2021 showing that £15.5 billion of estates were moving to a single spouse, of which 75% were women. Whether clients approaching retirement have adequately planned for the income consequences of widowhood or divorce deserves explicit attention in any financial plan.
The Financial Conduct Authority has long required that retirement advice address vulnerability; LCP’s data gives that requirement fresh urgency. Any review of a single client’s retirement strategy should now treat the single pensioner poverty rise as a named risk category, not an afterthought.
