Today's 20-year-olds are twice as likely as their parents to reach the age of 100, a new analysis of Britain's rapidly ageing population reveals today.

Radical plans to create a flat-rate £140-a-week state pension have been strongly supported in a public consultation.

The Daily Telegraph has been rebuked by the press watchdog after its reporters posed as constituents and secretly recorded Liberal Democrat ministers criticising their Tory coalition partners.

The basic state pension needs radical reform and cannot be immune from the Coalition Government's welfare shake-up, Iain Duncan Smith will declare today. The Work and Pensions Secretary wants to scrap the pension credit top-up scheme introduced by Labour for over-60s on low incomes and instead give people more incentive to save. The move could be signalled in the Budget on 23 March.

Around 30,000 women will be forced to work for two years longer than they had previously planned because of increases to the state pension age.

Three Liberal Democrat ministers have criticised the Government's decision to cut child benefit and lifted the lid on tensions between them and their Conservative Coalition partners.

The cold snap hitting parts of the UK have triggered the first Cold Weather Payments of the winter, the Government announced today.

Outlook So auto-enrolment into company pension schemes is here, although not immediately and there's a lot of phasing in to be done to get employers used to the idea. All the same, it is a pension reform idea with a dab more credibility than the carefully leaked, headline-grabbing figure of £140 for the basic state offering, which no one really believes will be affordable by the Coalition in this Parliament, if ever.

Outlook So after all the nasties, those public sector jobs, the removal of child benefit from anyone earning top-rate tax (even if they're not that rich) and the rest, it's time to throw the public a bone or two. Step forward the Pensions minister, Steve Webb, with a bold (and carefully leaked) plan to bring in a flat-rate state pension of £140 for all... well, at least those with sufficient time as residents of this country to have paid a decent amount of tax and NI.

The state pension could be increased to about £140 a week under Government plans to ensure everybody has a "decent" income in retirement.

The row over the Government's "progressive" credentials and the fairness of the emergency Budget is blown open today with new research from the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Almost a quarter of the UK population will be aged over 65 in 20 years' time, rising to over 40 per cent in some areas of the country, government figures revealed today.