Paying for a Citizen’s Pension

henry tapper

16 years ago

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The Citizen’s Pension is a big idea of Steve Webb, our Pension Minister and is a bolstered state pension that lifts people out of pensioner poverty and does away with means tested benefits.

I think it’s a good idea.

The Citizens Pension would have to be paid for by Treasury Funds and as the outgoing Chancellor famously commented – there isn’t any money left.

Economists see sense in a Citizen’s pension and are beginning to wonder how it could be afforded.

Michael Johnson is such an economist. His ideas have been widely listened to and adopted by Government. If I can simplify his arguments they run as follows

It is a good thing to have a Citizen’s pension
We can’t afford it
To afford it we need to cut higher rate tax relief for those saving into pensions

We can be grateful to Michael Johnson as he can be credited with introducing the idea of the Pensions Allowance – it curbs the super rich from getting pension awards of more than £40,000 per year without those awards being treated as taxable. While there have been a few small fish getting caught in the big fish net, most reasonable people think that the Pension Contribution Allowance is a good thing.

But his idea of restricting tax relief on pensions to 20% will fall flat on its face. It won’t raise the required revenues he says it will because companies will encourage higher rate taxpayers to swap salary for pension contributions. This will be a pain for companies in terms of administrative and legal costs and a pain for the Treasury to legislate against. We shouldn’t go there.

Most especially we shouldn’t go down the route of further pension and savings reform until we have bedded in the reforms that are on the table and are about to be enacted after extensive consultation.

The idea is also unfair as pensions attract higher rate tax in payment meaning that you might pay more rather than less tax by saving through a pension. Michael argues that the long-term goal of government should be to abolish higher-rate tax for pensioners. This will be scant comfort to those affected by his proposals today.

Either tax-avoidance measures will nullify the revenues or the public outcry will lead to a mass desertion from pensions. Bottom line this is a half-cocked measure.

I think Michael knows it. At the recent FT pension conference he more or less admitted as much when he reluctantly endorsed the need for compulsory retirement savings. Compulsion is a draconian measure and in its wake comes a number of other “nasties”. Once you compel people to save, you can get rid of tax-relief altogether as you have broken the social contract between the state and the citizen. Compulsion is the easy cop-out.

If instead of compulsion we have impulsion through auto-enrolment, it will undoubtedly come at a cost to the Treasury as Michael accepts. Auto-enrolment actually defers the implementation of a Citizen’s Pension as it takes yet more revenue out of the system. Millions of new savers will be getting tax-relief rather than paying tax. This is why Steve Webb has reluctantly accepted he cannot have both.

Michael accepts the value of auto-enrolment but rejects the needs for NEST. He is wrong to think that the private sector can take up the slack created if NEST was not to be pursued. There is no appetite among the insurers of personal pensions to cross-subsidise the pensions of the low paid.

Ultimately Michael must accept that we can’t afford to pay for the Citizens Pension by scrapping NEST or by abolishing Higher Rate Tax on pension contributions or even by scrapping means-tested benefits in retirement. Not with the current state of the country’s finances.

If we had embarked on a wholesale reform of our country’s pension provision when we had the chance-specifically when Frank Field was given the mandate to think the unthinkable in 1997 or when Brown and Blair went to war on this in 2004 or in the glory years that preceded the credit crunch, we might have seen something happen. That we didn’t is one of the failures of the Blair years.

We do not have the money to make wholesale reforms today, we must make the best of the limited resources at our disposal, the opportunities of auto-enrolment and the investment already sunk into NEST.

When we have digested auto-enrolment and introduced NEST then we can look again at the Citizen’s Pension.

When we have got that sorted, we can start looking at the ISA/pension harmonisation issues that form the basis of Michael’s current thinking.

BUT NOT TILL THEN.