I could bore you even more than I probably already do by listing each and every government’s attempt to ‘make pensions simpler to understand, easier to manage, and drive better value over the long term’, to quote this lots’ promo of their new pensions bill. OK, let’s go back just 20 years and work forward, we’ve had Stakeholder Pensions, Gordon Brown’s Pension Simplification, George Osborne’s Pension Freedoms, Auto-Enrolment Workplace Pensions, Lifetime Allowances both coming and going… and that’s just the high-profile (for us, anyway) stuff, with plenty of lower-grade tinkering in between. The devil is always in the detail, of course, but it looks as though the front-of-house is going to be some sort of new system to show ‘how well pension funds are performing’ – which sounds rather the sort of fund performance charts we have now, which regulation already makes pretty hard for the layman to comprehend. Making it easier to buy an annuity, not necessarily a good thing; and some sort of automatic merging of small pension pots. The more behind the scenes bit involves merging pension funds to ‘drive down costs’ and give wider investment options. The costs bit, we’ll see, bigger is not always cheaper, and we’ll also see how the wider investment options fit in with all the risk warnings needed for any vaguely risky investment. Cynical? Moi? Maybe I’ve seen just too many of them come and go. The result is usually more confusion, complication – and advice and advisers needed!
“Pensions minister: ‘we have created saving pots, but not a pension system’”
The OBR (Office of Budget Responsibility, as opposed to the OBI, often said to be housed in No.11) said this week that pensions were one of the biggest problems to be faced by this and future governments.
