Once a way to save money on a bike to work, the scheme is now a ‘life hack’ to lessen a tax bill or to qualify for free childcare

No, it’s not a delayed April fool: putting in a request to have your wages cut may actually result in you being better-off at the end of the month.

Salary sacrifice, sometimes known as salary exchange, is a great, if counterintuitive, “life hack”, according to Alice Guy, the head of pensions and savings at the investment platform interactive investor.

It has long been associated with initiatives such as the government’s cycle-to-work scheme , where you give up some of your earnings in exchange for a heavily discounted bike for your commute.

But with hundreds of thousands more people being dragged into higher tax brackets from this month, financial experts are highlighting it as a way of bringing down your personal tax bill, too.

Readers respond to an article by Owen Jones supporting plans by the Conservatives and Labour to maintain the triple lock on the state pension

The triple lock needs reform, but the wealth tax suggested by Owen Jones as a way of recouping revenue from wealthy pensioners will create other problems ( The poor need the money, the rich may not – but I say hands off the state pension triple lock, 27 March ).

One of the flaws in the existing triple lock is that the annual increase is determined as the greater of the yearly inflation rate and average wage increases in the year, with an underpin of 2.5%. But a one-off jump in inflation one year can easily be followed by a greater wage increase the next as salaries catch up, so the state pension benefits from two larger-than-usual increases rather than one. This can easily be mitigated by basing the state pension on the greater of cumulative inflation and wage increases rather than just using the yearly figures.

Jeremy Hunt said that keeping the pension triple lock would be in the Conservative party’s manifesto

Parliamentary pressure is building on the UK government to ban arms sales to Israel , amid signs that Israel intends to ignore the UN security council resolution passed this week calling on all sides to commit to a ceasefire, Patrick Wintour reports.

The Labour party has said that water company bosses should not be getting bonuses if their firms are still polluting rivers and the sea. It has also said they should be criminally liable for repeated failures to tackle pollution.

The Conservatives’ are too weak to get tough with polluting water companies.

Instead of imposing Labour’s ban on water bosses’ bonuses, Steve Barclay [the environment secretary] has weakly chosen to only talk about doing it.

The policy has its critics, but as Tories and Labour vow to keep it, I back its retention. It can be made fair, and a state should care for its people

A wealthy nation can afford to offer a comfortable and secure existence for all of its citizens. If it chooses not to do so, that is a political choice. If rationality reigned supreme, this would prove the starting point for all decisions about how society is organised. Bad news: it doesn’t, and instead much of the vast riches generated by the graft of millions of workers ends up hoovered into the bank accounts – and offshore tax havens – of a tiny few. The result? It’s easy to encourage the general population to believe that they’re locked in trench warfare over ever-scarcer resources, with so little to go around that politics is merely the art of managing a zero-sum game.

Enter, then, the question of the triple lock on the state pension, which both Tories and Labour have confirmed will feature in their upcoming manifestos. First introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, it ensures that pensioners’ entitlements increase each April in line with whatever is highest: inflation, the average increase in wages, or a 2.5% minimum. That means more than £100bn is now splashed on the state pension each year, by far the biggest single item of social security spending, while working-age benefits have fallen drastically behind. When you include other entitlements, well over half of the welfare state ends up in pensioners’ bank accounts. At the same time, more than 60% of older Britons own their home outright , sitting on golden eggs that have only appreciated in value.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Prime minister tells MPs the priority is to get inflation down even though English councils need another £4bn to maintain services

Rishi Sunak has denied there is a “crisis” in local government funding despite warnings that well-run councils are on the brink of bankruptcy and local services at risk without more support.

The prime minister admitted that councils faced “challenges”, in particular with inflation, which has significantly outpaced recent cash injections, at the cross-party liaison committee.

Larry Fink tells investors pension savings failing to keep pace with life-extending medical breakthroughs

The chief executive of the world’s largest asset manager is warning of a future “retirement crisis”, as pension savings fail to keep up with life-extending medical breakthroughs.

In his annual letter to investors , the BlackRock chief executive, Larry Fink, said that establishing “a secure, well-earned retirement” would be one of the greatest economic challenges to face the US in the mid-21st century.

Successive governments failed to explain pension changes. Thousands of women are entitled to compensation

The final report by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman on the way pension entitlement changes affecting women passed into law between 1995 and 2011 is a milestone in a long-running campaign – but not the end. Five years ago the women lost a discrimination case they had brought against the government. Their complaint to the ombudsman was the result, and the verdict vindicates their claim to have been unjustly treated.

The ombudsman made an initial set of findings in the women’s favour, and against the Department for Work and Pensions, in 2021. Now, these are added to by further instances of maladministration . While the failures uncovered are serious in their own right, the expectation set out in the report that the DWP will refuse to act on them is also very concerning.

Hilary Simpson was forced to make lump sum intended for five years stretch to over 10

• Thousands of UK women owed pension payout after ombudsman’s Waspi ruling
• What does report about UK state pension age changes mean for women affected?

Hilary Simpson was happy in 2009, when she was 55, to take early retirement from her job in local government. She wanted to help her daughter get on in her career by taking on childcare responsibilities of her granddaughter. And, after 30 years of hard work, she wanted to relax.

“It was an attractive offer we were given,” she says. “A lump sum and then a reduced pension. I assumed – because I had no evidence to the contrary – that I’d be getting my pension at 60. I drew up a spreadsheet for how to make the lump sum last five years, then signed on the dotted line.”

The way women’s state pension age was raised plunged retirement plans into chaos with many now in line for compensation

Thousands of women are owed compensation because of government failings related to the way changes to the state pension age were made, a long-awaited official report has said.

The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) said those affected were owed compensation but added that that Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had clearly indicated it would “refuse to comply”, which was “unacceptable”.