Here’s a tale of two generations, the pensioners and young workers. As the pandemic furlough winds down this week, one generation is destined for a mighty windfall from the government while the other gets nothing. The reason is clear: the Tories win three times more votes from one group than the other. As of this week, employers start picking up the furlough bill, previously paid by the government, and many will let staff go, with their businesses still running on empty. Most of those losing jobs will be young people in the low-paid hospitality, arts, entertainment and tourism sectors, who, warns the Resolution Foundation, will struggle to find work: reports of worker shortages “have been overplayed”, and so have reports of steep pay rises. But those artificial pay-rise figures are about to deliver a bonanza for pensioners. We can expect a fight between prime minister and chancellor: that age-old strife between a voter-pleasing big spender in No 10 and a fiscal rectitude-obsessed penny-pincher next door. With every minister pressing for funds in the autumn spending review, the question of uprating the pension is primal: every Tory MP was elected on a manifesto pledge to keep the pension triple lock in perpetuity. Butowing to a statistical accident, the chancellor finds it an exceptionally expensive promise. The pledge is to uprate pensions by consumer price inflation, by 2.5%, or by the rise in average earnings – whichever is the highest. But by a freak of the pandemic, wages appear to have risen by 5.6%, and later this month some economists predict a rise to 8%. Don’t imagine ordinary earners have really received this rise: the measure compares artificially low pay at the height of the first wave, when about 10 million furloughed workers lost 20% of their pay, with now. Low earners losing their jobs altogether takes them out of the figures, making the average rise look artificially high. Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation explains it like this: in a couple where one earns, say, £10,000 and the other £30,000, if the low earner loses their job, the couple’s average pay rises – because one drops out of the pay calculation altogether. He suggests the underlying rate is really just over 2%. To keep the triple lock will cost at least a walloping £4bn, yet again tilting state support towards all pensioners – regardless of their wealth – and away from working families and children. Ever since the triple lock was instituted, pensioners have gained, while a decade of benefit cuts has taken at least £37bn away from families. Yet when earnings growth was negligible last year pensioners still got their 2.5% increase, and now this injustice between generations may be exacerbated even further. The UK’s 12 million pensioners are already the group least likely to be poor, a historic transformation achieved under Labour, when a million were lifted above the poverty threshold. The blessed baby boomer generation has never-to-be-repeated private pensions, and colossal untaxed wealth in the value of homes bought cheaply, the value of which has risen by over 300% in the last three decades. Three-quarters of pensioners are homeowners. But there are some very poor pensioners, the oldest tending to be poorest, 2.1m of whom urgently need support. Labour introduced pension credit to top up pensions of those with virtually no other income. But here’s the scandal: nearly a million are not claiming an already too-low pension credit, losing on average £32 a week. Two hundred thousand pensioner households fail to claim an average £62 in housing benefit. Older single women, who have the lowest pensions, are owed most. Many miss out not through pride, but because they don’t know their rights or need help to claim, so more than £2bn sits in the Treasury unclaimed every year. Since everyone gets their basic state pension, the Department for Work and Pensions knows exactly where these non-claiming poor pensioners are and should be commissioning councils, Age UK and Citizens Advice to contact every one of them. It’s an amusing irony that, now the over-75s are starting to have to pay for their TV licences – unless they draw pension credit – an avalanche of new pension credit claims is expected, which may end up costing the government a fat slice of the money it cut from the BBC. The government needs to give poor pensioners increased pension credit, then abandon the triple lock. Also people of working age shouldn’t pay for the awaited new social care system, which must come from the property wealth of the old themselves. Nor should the chancellor try to balance his debts on the backs of the young, who have the least. “Levelling up” should mean fairness between the generations too, so give a high priority to restoring the billions denied to schools to catch up on academic time lost during the pandemic, and for their lost arts and sports. The Resolution Foundation describes how the jobs and careers landscape for the young is causing a mental health crisis, all as their chances of buying a home are receding. Bell says the UK has far greater wealth than any EU country, though it sits there in bricks and mortar, out of reach for most young people. Despite recent talk of too many graduates, in the UK just 50% of the population has a degree, compared with an OECD average of 70%. That’s according to Prof Bobby Duffy’s forthcoming book, Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are? But his research shows how forgiving the young are too. They don’t blame the old for stealing their future. “They don’t want to mug Grandma,” according to Duffy. People live in families, not in generational isolation; and they’re well aware that they will grow old too. There’s no reason to play off the needs of the young against the old. But if Boris Johnson insists on bribing voters by keeping the pension triple lock this year when it makes no sense, then the young should also get many multiples of that – if his much vaunted “levelling up” is to mean anything at all. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist