Hargreaves Lansdown has roped to the John Cridland review of the state pension age that pensions could be paid early to those in poor health.
Its proposal is that there would be early access from age 60 for people in poor health with the state pension expressed as both an income from state pension age and a capital sum if accessed ahead of that point.
The capital sum would be discounted to take account of early access and individuals would use that sum to purchase an annuity where it gave a higher income than the state pension.
Hargreaves Lansdown's head of retirement policy Tom McPhail said: "The state pension age needs to rise, to reflect general improvements in life expectancy across the population, because otherwise the whole scheme will eventually become unsustainably expensive. However we also need to accommodate those with poor life expectancy."
Varying the pension based on gender, post code, occupation or ethnicity would be arbitrary and potentially lead to unlawful discrimination and so he said: "a fairer and more efficient approach would be to use the underwriting expertise of specialist annuity providers, to target higher payouts to those individuals who have a lower life expectancy, whatever the reason for it".
