I’m by the river on a Sunday morning when we’ll be remembering people who died for us. This river has flowed through Oxford and the boat you can see beside me is my Lady Lucy who has been to Oxford
Two weeks ago I was in John Radcliffe hospital Oxford -I’d been taken there from Eton’s Broccas in a helicopter and a coma! I went back there by car last Friday and pronounced well enough to return to full duties.
I’m told I had a haemorrhage following a seizure and am assured I’m now on the right dose of drugs to make a full recovery! I know I have the care of the NHS which keeps me sprightly.
I won’t be driving a car to Oxford today or again but that doesn’t worry me. I am a lucky chap to live where we do and have so many memories of boat trips and those who came with me.
Lady Lucy cannot be a part of my later years! She’s taken care of me and several thousand boaters!
The comments and the messages have helped me through the two weeks I was deemed to be in danger. E “get-well-soons” worked fine!
I’ve been on sedatives , though they don’t seem to have worked! I’m off them now and though I will have scars, I am told I will have no further deterioration of my neurological powers!
This Sunday I will try out a new cap which keeps my wounds from getting wet and allows me to go swimming again.
But before I do , I will say “thank you” to make our country such a wonderful place to live in. I want it to be a wonderful country to retire in.
Mind you, with so much to be done, retirement won’t be any time soon!
The right wing politicians and their journalists have ignored the most important part of the Pension Schemes Act and the introduction of workplace collective pensions. What this Government has introduced is an opportunity for every one of the 17m savers into workplace pension to get a pension.
The Times has started a campaign suggesting that people who choose not to do what they like with their pension pot will have guided retirement into a pension. That is because most people who do not know what to do with their pension pot want some guidance and most people never wanted a pension pot in the first place. They wanted the pension that this barmy campaign is fighting against.
I like Ros Altmann, Steve Webb and Guy Opperman and am sorry that they have been herded into this campaign when they have been pension ministers and not pension pot ministers. I certainly wouldn’t call them “potty” so I’m surprised they’re against 17m pot-holders being denied a pension.
This second article bookends our weekend’s pension reading . It can be read here.
It kicks off with a contention that is wrong
The radical changes will push 17 million private sector workers to give up their pension savings in return for an income that attempts to keep pace with inflation and lasts until the day they die.
This needs challenging as the Government’s MoneyHelper has spelled out the situation that has been in place since the introduction of Pension Freedoms in April 2015
This is not changing, you will be able to take your money from 55 till April 2028 after which from 57. Most people don’t start taking a pension from then, they take their pot as a cash sum and they can still do that. Nothing in this explanation below is changing, there is no freedom lost for taking your pension pot so long as you have one.
What people are getting is a guarantee that when they get to a certain age, set by the pension provider or its trustees, people will get their money paid to them as a pension.
There are many ways to pay a pension and people can choose for their pension to be paid as a guaranteed annuity which doesn’t go up or goes up at a fixed amount or in line with inflation. This kind of annuity pays out till death do us part.
People can choose to have the CDC pension paid by trustees selected by their employer, this will “aim” to pay out a pension in line with inflation and sometimes they’ll pay more of sometime less than inflation. In extreme circumstances they will pay less than the year before but they’ll always pay a pension till death do us part.
People can choose to drawdown their pot(s) as they need the money which may not be at all. Going this way means funds may not be there to spend until death do us part.
And people can choose not to make their own choice in which case they will get a pension paid to them which will aim to keep being paid in line with increases in the cost of living (inflation). Not doing anything will mean that your money will last until death do us part.
It’s this last choice that the Times claims is pushing people from pot to pension. That is so wrong and it is irresponsible of this campaign to misrepresent CDC and guided retirement as threatening people’s freedom. People still have all their choices and the freedom to walk away from pensions.
With Collective (CDC) Pensions, Annuities, and the State Pension, you are locked in to the pension and cannot take your pension as you like. With DC pensions, the ones you get from Guided Retirement, you will have freedom to override the pension being paid and take more or less than the pension promise.
Nest has already said that it will pay a DC pension (that lasts as long as you do) from your pot and people will get that DC pension unless they choose another destination for their money.
Lifesight ( a master trust run by WTW) has said that it will transfer people into a Collective (CDC) pension unless somebody chooses something else.
Millions of British people get their pensions paid to them either by the Government as a public (or occasionally private) Defined Benefit pension. CDC pensions will be paid in the same way to Royal Mail collective pension members and to all the other people in CDC pensions. Everyone in these pensions can choose to transfer to a pot if they choose to until they start getting their pension being paid to them.
So what does this campaign want to happen?
This is even more barmy. The campaigners say
We want to see the reforms face a proper vote in parliament, savers to be told if they could get a better deal elsewhere, and pensioners to be given ample time to change their mind and get their money back.
This is already in place.
People who go the DC pension will not lose their right to pension freedom until an annuity or similar kicks in. Nest say that is when people get to 85 when a pension for life becomes more important than a pot that could run out.
People retiring into a Retirement Collective Pension Scheme (RCPS) will have a year’s cooling off period in which they can choose to get their pot back.
People who choose to take other choices such as drawdown (without the pension) or an annuity – a guaranteed pension, will have made up their mind to go that way.
And for millions, the pension will be paid from a defined benefit scheme still have the choice to transfer to a pot though (unlike CDC) , people in DB need to take advice so long as the value offered to the pot is more than £30k).
Those in the largest defined benefit scheme of all (the State Pension) will get no choices other than to delay taking pension later than the State Pension Age.
Pension Ministers aren’t stupid but they can be made out to be..
Steve Webb , Ros Altmann and Guy Opperman are purported to be saying we are losing our freedoms. They aren’t stupid and nor are we.
The majority of us 17m savers want a pension not a pot. We’ll continue to take a tax-free pot as cash. A minority of us will choose our own way , the rest of us will get the pension we’ve been guaranteed (one way or another!).
There is a new way of doing thing, but the pension freedoms aren’t being taken away. It’s not like compulsory annuities used to be. The Times is scaremongering – dragging good pension ministers into a quarrel we need not have. I hope that the ordinary people in this country will avoid this scurrilous campaign.
Impressive volume of inaccuracies in one article. The facts:
– not a single pension freedom is being ‘stripped away’.
– savers will have full control over how they want to use their savings in retirement.
This article = Tory/coalition ex-ministers scaremongering to defend a status quo that simply isn’t good enough for private sector workers. Those ex-ministers have pensions that guarantee incomes lasting through retirement – we are going to make sure more workers have that option
I may sound a little harsh about our banks but they really are rubbish at pensions.
Infact they’re pretty crap all round as Gordon Aitken points out.
Gordon has commented that banks have outperformed life insurers for some time but in budget week the banks plummeted while insurers did very nicely (see above) and my recent blog.
I know the more important role of life insurers is to dismantle UK pension schemes but what about banks? What have UK banks been doing with pensions over the past ten years?
NatWest has purchased Cushon and then sold them on to WTW when they couldn’t make it a platform to sell their retail products. The same story goes for HSBC who tried to build heir own master trust only to jack it in before it sold a bean. Barclays have threatened to sell personal pensions but have failed to do so while Lloyds are the only bank to still have a workplace pension in Scottish Widows.
Apart from L&G no insurer has made “scale” yet but it’s the ones that haven’t been flirting with banks that have done best and the workplace pensions that have made it three times over (Nest , Lifesightand People’s Pension)
Scottish Widows are clinging on to “scale” because of their legacy personal pension books but have a conspicuously history in workplace pensions with a master trust that is relying on for growth on consolidating the Lloyds staff DC scheme, (Your Tomorrow).
I’ve no idea why banks can’t do pensions but the evidence is clear to see. Maybe that’s one reason why UK life insurers are doing rather better than UK banks.
Like Richard I keep my faith in Nest but like Smudger I am exasperated with Nest. Nest is not putting its best foot forward and encouraging the Pensions Dashboard. The Dashboard gets 14m records posted on it by Nest but none of them are accurate and they are reducing our wish to see the Pension Dashboard live.
The Pensions Dashboard is a Government fronted initiative, Nest is a Government funded pension scheme and the 14m who have pots with Nest deserve to see what they would buy under the new Guided Retirement guarantee!
Richard wants to hear views and as he reads this blog, please leave your comments in the space below.
I do not think it is satisfactory that Nest stays silent on this. It should explain what its intentions are to get the information it puts on Pensions Dashboard up to date. If it doesn’t, what conclusions can we draw
That it doesn’t care how 14m people see their income or the pot that underwrites it?
That it is incompetent enough not to have developed technology to link the Nest dashboard to the Pensions Dashboard?
That it has a plan and it’s holding up the Pension Dashboard which must move at its speed?
All this speculation is legitimate as speculation. The Government (aka the Pensions Minister) has complained that the private sector is bring pensions into disrepute. Nest is not a private sector pension but it provides a service to the private sector. It is hardly improving our trust in pensions.
I will return the compliment to Torsten Bell. DWP’s pension scheme is failing 14 million private workers, if it doesn’t get up to date values on the DWP Pensions Dashboard. Get “public” Nest improving our trust in pensions too.
Not all of us are optimistic about improving the lot of those retiring and in retirement. It is interesting to see who is against what Torsten Bell is up to.
The most significant retirement shake-up for a generation threatens to strip away pension freedoms and leave savers worse off.
The radical reforms, announced this week, will push 17 million workers to exchange their pension pot savings for the promise of an income that attempts to keep pace with inflation and lasts until the day they die. However, critics have highlighted a plethora of red flags that they say risk costing private sector pension savers when the changes arrive in 2029. Experts have warned that the reforms could chip away at valuable pension freedoms that empowered savers to make their retirement pots go further. And it is feared that the changes could be pushed through parliament without proper scrutiny.
In response, Times Money is launching its Stop the Pension Power Grab campaign, calling for measures to ensure that retirements are protected. Writing in The Times, the Conservative shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately said that Labour had
“announced the biggest change to how people draw down their pensions in a decade ” and called the move a “power grab dressed up as a consultation”
Baroness Altmann, a former pensions minister, criticised the “nanny state” plans. She said:
“It’s not up to the government or the pensions industry to say, ‘We know better than you,’ and that’s one of the problems with this approach.
“If you want people to invest and be happy with their pensions, you need to make sure people understand what is happening with their money rather than being told to disengage because ‘other people know better than you’.”
The reforms from the pensions minister Torsten Bell, who was previously chief executive of the left-leaning think-tank the Resolution Foundation, are a significant shift away from the pension freedoms of 2015 that gave savers more control over their savings and encouraged them to keep their money invested while taking an income.
Before then savers usually had to exchange their pension pots for an annuity, which paid out an income until they died. However, pension firms were strongly criticised, and in some cases fined millions of pounds, for failing to tell savers that they could get more for their money by shopping around. Critics fear that Bell’s proposals risk leaving savers exposed to the same widespread mis-selling.
To best protect pension savers, Times Money is calling for:
The reforms to face a proper vote in parliament.
Savers to be told if they could get a better deal elsewhere.
Pensioners to be given ample time to change their mind and get their money back.
Bell’s attempt to give the government powers to dictate how pension funds invest their money was rejected by the House of Lords this year. Bell claims this new shake-up will help to bridge the gap between private and public sector pensions, which guarantee to pay an income that rises in line with inflation until you die.
The retirement reforms announced on Tuesday were the biggest since savers were given radical pension freedoms by George Osborne, then chancellor, more than a decade ago. The details of the measures, which will not be the subject of full parliamentary debate, will mean pension savers will no longer be left alone to decide what to do with their retirement funds, unless they go to the trouble of opting out of schemes that will aim to provide income until they die.
However, politicians and pensions experts have warned that savers could lose out if the reforms are not properly executed. Times Money has found that:
Critics fear that the reforms will take valuable control away from savers.
Savers will get no guarantee on the rate of income they will get or if it will rise with inflation.
Pensioners could be left unable to get their money back.
The changes could be pushed through with limited parliamentary scrutiny.
The consultation document published on Tuesday was riddled with errors.
Experts say the reforms will do little to bridge the gap between public and private sector pensions.
A retirement revolution?
Traditional workplace pensions that pay out an income for life based on your salary — known as defined benefit (DB) schemes — are now rare in the private sector because they are prohibitively expensive for businesses to offer. Instead, most workplaces offer defined contribution (DC) schemes, where contributions go into a pot and what you get in retirement depends on how much is paid in and stock market growth.
Osborne’s pension freedoms meant savers were no longer obliged to buy an annuity (an insurance product that pays out a guaranteed income), so since 2015 they have been able to spend their pot how they like when they reach retirement age. This, however, left millions facing daunting choices over how to manage their savings to avoid running out of money later in life.
Under the plans announced this week, a new “guided retirement” framework will require all pension firms to offer a default pension that automatically converts savings pots into a regular, reliable income. When a saver is ready to retire, their pension firm will ask a few basic questions (such as their age, marital status, housing, and whether they have other savings) and guide them into a suitable default plan.
Savers will be asked to agree to the scheme only once, and before that point will have the option to take their money elsewhere. But once they are routed into a default collective pension scheme their savings will be pooled with thousands of others in a single fund. Once they have been invested for a year, the saver can no longer change their mind and get their money back.
Bell said he expects many pension firms to offer a “flex then fix” approach, which would allow savers to take an income from their pot until later in retirement when they could use the remaining pot to buy a guaranteed income.
Lack of scrutiny
Helen Whately, the shadow work and pensions minister, has raised concerns that the changes will be passed into legislation without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
Although the principal of pensions reforms was part of the Pension Schemes Bill, which was passed into law in April, the details of the shake-up announced this week will be debated only by a delegated legislation committee in the Commons, and probably a grand committee in the House of Lords.
Unlike parliamentary bills, regulations cannot be amended, only approved or rejected. The House of Lords rarely votes against regulations — it has done so less than five times between 1950 and 2019. If the changes were put forward in a bill they would get several days of debate in the House of Commons and be open to an amendment.
Times Money found that the government consultation paperwork appeared to have been prepared in a rush, containing errors. One section mistakenly refers to the Pensions Act 2021 rather than the Pension Schemes Act. Other sections were missing words and had punctuation errors.
Bell had said his reforms would mark the return of “genuine pensions” that would help to bring private sector savings schemes closer to the inflation-proofed salary-linked deals that are on offer in parts of the public sector. But Altmann, who was pensions minister in 2015-16, said this was “absolute nonsense”.
“There is no way you could expect it to deliver the same sort of returns as public sector pensions. Even more worrying is that if people think that might happen, they are going to be angry when they realise that it won’t.”
She said these types of guaranteed savings schemes could be dangerous because they depend on some savers dying younger than expected to subsidise those who live longer, and on a fund’s good performance in the markets.
“Those coming after you may end up with a lot less if they are victims of bad markets,”
she said.
The new scheme promises to deliver better returns by pooling pension pots, allowing fund managers to take bigger risks and hopefully drive better growth. Savers could be allowed to combine pension pots from different employers.
Royal Mail was the first employer to launch a similar scheme, in 2023. In its first year the fund had a 6.4 per cent return — two percentage points above the rate of inflation. However, there is no guarantee that the government’s pension schemes will provide income that will keep up with inflation — this will depend on fund performance, which means there is a risk that pensioners could be worse off than if they bought an annuity on the open market, or kept their pot invested elsewhere and took an income through what is known as drawdown.
Tomm Adams, a partner at the advisory firm Blick Rothenberg, said:
“Phrases like ‘genuine pension’ as used in the government’s announcement shouldn’t overpromise: income from this type of scheme could go down as well as up.
“While this scheme could provide sensible guardrails as people live longer, freedom of choice, consent before any conversion and access to tax-free cash must be preserved.”
Knowledge is power
Before 2015 three quarters of those with a DC pot were effectively forced to use it to buy an annuity at retirement that would provide them with a guaranteed, fixed income for life. You could leave your pension invested and take income from it, but this was not the easy option, and the percentage of your pot that you could take was capped by a government-set limit. Only pensioners who had a guaranteed minimum secure income of £20,000 a year (later reduced to £12,000) could make unlimited withdrawals.
Many savers bought annuities directly from their pension firm without realising they could shop around and get better deals elsewhere. Savings firms frequently failed to ask or inform their customers about enhanced annuities, which could offer higher payouts for those with health conditions.
The pension firm Standard Life was fined £30.7m and Prudential £23.9m by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the City regulator, for failings over the sales of pensions and annuities.
Times Money is calling for the government to establish safeguards so that pension firms have to be transparent about their fees and charges, and explicitly tell consumers if they can get better deals elsewhere.
The need for a get-out clause
Catherine Foot from the Standard Life Centre for the Future of Retirement said it was unclear how hard customers would be pushed towards the new retirement regime.
“There has to be guardrails — the scheme should be a safety net, not a box you can’t get out of.”
In the 29 months after the 2015 pension freedoms twice as many pots were moved into drawdown than were used to buy annuities and 53 per cent of the pots accessed were fully withdrawn. The Pensions Commission, which was revived by the government in 2025 to look at how the system was working, has said that savers are spending their money at an unsustainable rate. Some 25 per cent start taking money from their pots at the first opportunity, and a third of pots worth between £100,000 and £249,999 are being spent at a rate of 8 per cent a year.
Experts say that keeping withdrawals to 4 per cent of your pension should ensure that your pot will last for a 30-year retirement. But pensioners may have other forms of wealth — such as housing — to fall back on in their later years.
“Pension firms have a narrow view of their customers, and they don’t know about their wider financial circumstances, such as their housing situation,”
Foot said.
“Guided retirement can only really work if the firm creating that default has enough of a sense of your total financial situation, and that’s not the case at the moment.”
What about inheritance?
From April pension pots will form part of your estate for inheritance tax purposes. If the whole of your pot has been pooled under the proposed new system to provide an income, there will be no pot to pass on when you die.
Steve Webb, a former pensions minister in the coalition government who is now at the consultancy LCP, said:
“If your DC pot turns into an income for life, then, with limited exceptions, such as payouts for minimum guaranteed periods, there is likely to be no inheritance tax liability. But there will be nothing to inherit either.”
He said that he thought the government was
“fundamentally hostile to the concept of pension freedoms. It has loaded the defaults much too far towards the view that a ‘regular income for life’ is really the only thing you should do with your pot.
“That may be right for some, such as a renter who has no other regular income and has a rent to pay every month, but much less so for others, such as a couple with two state pensions, some legacy DB pension, other savings and so on. They may want the flexibility to take their pension when they want, and to ‘front load’ spending in retirement if they wish.”
Rachel Vahey from the investment firm AJ Bell said:
“More choice in retirement should mean better outcomes for pension savers, not more confusion or false expectations.
“The danger is that savers could find themselves in arrangements they don’t fully understand, and ultimately with less income in retirement than they had planned for or had been led to expect based on overly optimistic assumptions.”
The consultation into the government’s guided retirement proposals, run in partnership with the Pensions Regulator and the FCA, runs until December 22.
The government said:
“Millions of private sector workers are saving for retirement but reach the end of their working lives with a pot of money rather than a pension they can rely on.
“Guided Retirement will change that, giving them the option of a secure income for the whole of their retirement and we are working with pension providers and employers to make sure it is practical to deliver.
“This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Pension schemes will design around the needs of their members, and anyone who wants a different option will always be free to choose one, including opting out altogether.”
I’m sitting two miles from Centrica to my west and two miles to Slough to my north. Centrica controls the supply of gas and it looks like the data centres of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and down the M4 corridor are going to need a lot more poser than the electricity can deliver any time soon.
The proposed Quest Park Data Centre Campus is looking to build a gas power station because it cannot hook into the electricity grid for 7 or 8 years. If I was working for Centrica (my partner was its pension manager) then I’d be very happy with my employee stock options.
The Americans are thinking now of gas as a stable way to power data centres
While America spent last week telling its governors it no longer wanted data centers on its doorstep (or its drain on its coveted power resources ) , Britain hasn’t yet had the backlash against AI.
Here there is a big question for Government. Are we behind the States and will we turn against Data Centres and our AI? Or will we find the likes our technology, the cutting edge of the West. Deep Mind was British till we sold it to America.
The East isn’t showing any sign on reigning back on AI development and China may soon overtake what’s happened in California.
I agree with Dan Tomlinson. The UK success story for AI, pivots on our enthusiasm. We have the power, do we have the will to lead?
Dan Tomlinson, the Government’s growth minister said it was a mistake to “assume the same battle lines will be drawn here”. Britain can avoid a “big polarising debate on data centres” and ensure that construction continues as “essential infrastructure”.
So where does our enthusiasm come from? I think we all know that most of us spend a lot of our day at a keyboard and most of that time consulting with AI one way or another. We in the pension industry , more than most, need our customers to understand where their money is going and what they can expect at the other end by way of pension.
Not only should we be reliant on AI , we should be funding its operation and the power that it needs. That means money in our power industry, especially renewables and gas which we have a plenty, the former in Scotland and the latter in the north sea. We have gas powered powered station such as Drax (Centrica) and we have Europe’s biggest farm of data centers in Slough. We are even pioneering the import of excess energy from Iceland’s thermal sources.
I have some skin in this game, writing on a computer , consuming power to indulge in conversing with AI and enjoying this while gazing out to the world’s largest inhabited castle- more than 100o years old!
Julius Pursaill is no longer at WTW’s Cushon. Maybe his extraordinary story when building the Master Trust from a start up to what NatWest bought needs rehearsal. It doesn’t look a story that Willis Towers Watson bought but he should give a more receptive audience at the Pension PlayPen coffee morning
Cushon was a business about building relationships with members. It was founded on how Cushon spoke with members and how Cushon invested their money.
There are other firms that are running DC schemes that satisfy their customers. This blog has been running blogs on Pension Bee since 2016 and about Collegia who are doing the same thing with workplace pensions.
At Tuesday’s meeting we’ll be hearing from Julius what needs to be done if DC masters are to withstand the interest in pensions , satisfied by CDC.
Now DC saving schemes are on the way out and everyone in them will be guaranteed a lifetime income.
Julian will be telling us about the challenge the guided retirement framework creates for DC schemes and how they are going to have to raise their game if their money isn’t going to transfer to collective pensions.
Julian is in no doubt that CDC schemes are going to challenge commercial and employer owned DC schemes by taking away not just their future contributions but their existing pots.
He also sees DC schemes that haven’t shaped up will find their opportunity to make money from those past normal retirement age, has been transferred to better marketed alternatives
The lazy workplace and legacy pension arrangements don’t wash it with soon to be pensioners with large pots
These are being picked off by wealth managers such as SJP and transferred to fast growing schemes such as Pension Bee.
says Julius
DC schemes of whatever type should try harder to engage and KEEP members! This coffee morning is for providers, proprietors, trustees, advisors and unions (representing members).
Master Trust profitability will increasingly be valued by how successfully AI is harnessed to create emotional connections with members.
Those providers that get their members interested in where money is invested will convert those emotional connections into higher AUM, more new business wins, increased profitability and better member outcomes. These pensions will be better aligned with regulators Julius Pursaill believes such pensions will be creating a self-reinforcing virtuous circle.
There is no value in operating a price cutting strategy. It will not satisfy VFM assessments.
While the regulatory framework appears to protect incumbents already at scale, the structural challengers many Master trusts face in executing this strategy provides an opportunity for those more flexible, far sighted Master Trusts to create a sustainable competitive advantage. The scale benefits of early execution will compound, Pursaill believes
In addition to the work he has done as Chair of the RBS Trustee and helping Cushon , Julius is a Governor of the Pensions Policy Institute and is a NED of Guiide. TREX and Plunder AI,
The PPI’s produced new modelling showing a fifth (20%) of the UK working population face retirement adequacy risks despite relatively high earnings.
The report, ‘UK Pensions Framework: How Work Shapes Retirement Outcomes’, sponsored by Aviva, provides modelling of six representative worker profile demonstrating that a relatively high earner, with a greater capacity to save (Profile A), may still have comparatively lower pension contributions to someone with lower earnings and reduced capacity to save (Profile F).(1)
The research highlights employer contributions as one of the key drivers of contrasting pension outcomes between the two groups.
As the Second Pensions Commission prepares to make recommendations to the government on the broader questions of adequacy, fairness, and sustainability within the UK pensions system – and with a third State Pension age review also launched last year – the study challenges assumptions that the policy issue of retirement adequacy can be understood primarily through earnings.
The analysis explains that a comparably highly paid private-sector worker (Profile A) may build relatively less pension wealth than a lower paid public sector worker (Profile F), due to the former’s employer pension provision being weaker, with contributions close to minimum levels, or remuneration including elements that are not reflected fully in pension contributions.
The investigation notes Profile A workers therefore face the potential risk of not being able to maintain working life living standards in retirement, if they stay within Profile A throughout their careers.
Conversely, Profile F, just over a tenth (11%) of the UK working population, may have lower earnings that may constrain their capacity to save, but enjoy stronger employer pension provision and greater access to Defined Benefit arrangements that provide greater support for retirement adequacy.
The research concludes that policy on adequacy requires a more holistic perspective that considers where additional saving can realistically come from, how earnings and pension saving are unevenly distributed across the working population, and how institutional pension provision plays a critical role in retirement adequacy.
I don’t think we need to be surprised that what’s paid for our retirement by the boss is part of our pay package.
The PPI asks us to recognise we’re exchanging today’s pay cut for tomorrow’s wage in retirement.
We currently expect our workplace pension to do a lot of things including paying off mortgages with cash , paying the inheritance tax bill and all the other things we promised us (buying the new car, holiday, golf clubs etc).
But a pension has been distorted to do things. What most people still think of when the word “pension” arises is what they get from the state or if they’re lucky the lifetime income they get from being in a proper pension scheme.
To properly understand what people want with the money they allow to be taken from pay, we have many surveys…