jill kirby - 'unintended consequences'?
12:25 | 03 May 2009
I suspect that the 'unintended consequences' of pension legislation destroying private sector pensions is not 'unintended' at all.
Peter - A warm-up act before the big performance
13:46 | 03 May 2009
I hope that this is a warm-up before the main show - dismantling the burden on taxpayers created by defined benefit pensions for civil servants and other public sector workers.
stephen phillips - PENSIONS ALREADY STRANGLED
14:34 | 03 May 2009
Dunno about tightening grip - NewLabour has already strangled UK pensions - excpet of the public sector.
Funny thing is I don't recall it being in the manifestos.
Theo`` - Private Pensions at Risk
14:34 | 03 May 2009
Who the hell cares for private pensions when civil servants and MPs have index linked feather beds? Tax payers should pay up and shut up.
derek farman - swindle
15:08 | 03 May 2009
Brown for pensions is what piggy flu is for good health .
Because he is a weazling twister , instead of making pension legislation transparent so that everyone can understand it , he has been bamboozling all of us ordinary folk with complication upon complication and extracted billions from our pension funds .
We are such a bunch of idiots to let him get away with it .
The French would have shut down everything and shouted foul if he had tried his sculduggery on them .
This pension mess can be sorted .
1)Kick Brown and his bunch out
2)Simplify the entire thing so that me and the average guy in the street can understand it .
3)Link it to the Old Age Pension and top that up with protected voluntary extra payments with annual statements to show what the final pension will be . Extra payments could be in the form of interest bearing government bonds .
4)All pensions should be on the same footing . Private and Public .
Bernard - Why discrininate -we are all public servants
15:25 | 03 May 2009
As I understand it, other European countries such as Austria, regard everyone in work as a public servant. Isn't this obvious? The calculation of GDP depends largely on the output of the private sector, notably the financial sector that in the last 12 years gave Brown a tax gift that deluded him into boasting of the end of boom and bust. The City was certainly productive - it produced money out of nothing.
Does a council apparatchik in Washport on the Ouse contribute more to our GDP than a worker in that town's refrigerator factory, whether manager or fitter? Why should No 4 in the Treasury look forward to being 60,when he could retire on a comfortable pension, while a cashier in Barclays Washport branch has to make make do with a pittance at 65, while the self-employed repairman who keeps the Washport fridges working is regarded as a greedy crook who must be entangled in a tighter net than any gladiator in the Coliseum. .
I know that in these matters logic lies been trodden into the dust, but the whole complicated machinery giving employment
to battalions in the Treasury and brigades in accountancy is absurdly expensive and unproductive, for those clever clogs could apply their skills to the creation of real wealth. .
Higher taxes funding a state pension that rewards all whose lifetime of work has in many different ways contributed to the country's daily life and wealth would end this absurd battle in "a marriage of true minds."
Would anyone care to compare the nation's bounty towards firefighters and enemy fighters? Perhaps on the basis of a relative death and injury rate? Firefighters enjoy London Weighting of over £4000 year. What is Afghanistan Weighting at the moment? What's the danger money? How do their pensions compare?
Can Steve, the expert, tell us, please?
Perhaps Steve can tell us.
edmundb - You must be joking
15:25 | 03 May 2009
What policymaker gives a s..t about private pensions for anyone. Brown, though trumpeting the virtues of the Bankers has a pathological distrust of the private sector- unsurprising since he has ever only known the corporatism of church, university and the labour party - he knows he's OK , and is prepared to accept gold plated pensions for the rest of the public sector knowing that if labour even suggest reform the Unions will withdraw their support for the New Labour project and even more Labour MPs will lose their jobs at the next GE - not that that makes much of a difference to MPs who can draw and inflation proofed full pension if they have served for 10 years - Turkeys? Christmas? I think not
Gaz - Execs are in a different pension scheme anyway
15:48 | 03 May 2009
This'll be an excuse, not a reason, for execs to end final salary schemes.
If you read the annual reports of big companies, most times the executive board are on different pension arrangements to the rest of the staff so ending one scheme won't end everyone's in many cases.
Plus, even those executives who are in the same scheme as normal employees are going to want to save for pensions so ending one scheme only to invest in another is pointless.
Then you've got the fact that 20% tax relief is better than none, and high earners were already going to be hit by the 60% tax rate due to the sizes of their pension pots in any case.
If you want to blame the govt for ending FS schemes, blame it on their early meddling with company reporting, whereby deficits in pensions schemes had to impact the blanance sheet; or by the taxation of dividends within pension schemes.
Brown was behind them both.
Iain - ITS NOT FAIR, MYWORLD OF ESAY MONEY HAS COLLAPSED.
16:05 | 03 May 2009
Funny how nobody has a word to say about public sector pensions when the private sector was racking it in getting money for nothing from plumbers to stockbrokers etc.
Now their little world has collapsed we must stop public sector pensions because we have lost our feathered nest !!
Jealousy jealousy jealousy.
Didn't you think of repairing the roof while the sun was shining cretins ?
The real problem is not public sector pensions but all the private sector workers fiddling their taxes, the single parent wasters expecting free food and keep for life just because they chose to open their legs.
All the benefit merchants working and claiming benefits. Those are the ones to sort out. Then we could all half the tax we pay.
No while the public sector brigade chose to sacrifice the ability to become a millionaire in return for a modest salary and secure pension the private sector were racking it in.
Graham - 52 and I want to get out
17:14 | 03 May 2009
Iain
You are obviously a (less than ) civil servant.
Talk about broad brush. I have worked hard all my life and paid into a personal pension but people like me have been well and truly screwed by this Govt right from day one when they raided the pensions the first time.
Every time Gordon cant make his sums add up we get a futher shafting via a stealth tax. What a loser. No wonder all the English want to leave this mucked up Country and all the foreigners want to come here.
What has been the point in saving for the future. So that Gordon my sums never add up can put our retirement back and back.
Why not just keep the whole pension thing simple. Bunch of crooks the lot of them!!!
david - What is the measure of a reasonable living?
19:19 | 03 May 2009
One hears so much about average wages, average living standards, average income, and average costs, when talking about how we live in this British community, but I ask do we know or can we identify where this standard of a reasonable life is.
In the 60's when I first started work this was identified as 2/3rds of average wage, and that the pension provision was set at that level.
In today's UK the state pension provides for an elderly living equal to 1/5th of average wage.
With the current wealth destruction that we have implicit to the elderly who have endeavoured to be a credit to their British community, we see a level of living that can only be referred to as one of serious constraint.
To correct this unprecedented and pitiful oppression upon the impoverished proportion of the elderly what is needed is a general raising of the basic pension by a considerable amount.
Those elderly whom have been fortunate to be in a position to avoid the constraints that I have mentioned, would through their payment of taxes level the playing field, thereby avoiding the comment that a general increase benefits those whom have no needs, but it would safeguard those elderly, whom are suffering what cannot surely be called a reasonable living standard.
Viking - Pensions
21:16 | 03 May 2009
Here in Norway there are very small salary differentials between the educated professional and the ordinary man in the street. We also receive similar pensions. (In fact someone leaving school at 16 may get a bigger pension than someone staying in education until 22 because he has more years of contribution!)
I think there is much less jealousy here and everyone is happy because they think the system is fair. The pensions are also generous for all.
Glen McKeown - Pensions for the Hysterical
21:49 | 03 May 2009
The sad aspect of most comments in the current pension is the level of bitterness expressed.
The Government, any British Government, is so consumed by political infighting, pressure groups and Budget balancing that there is no time to consider what we are trying to achieve - at its very basic trying to keep pensioners off the breadline in retirement.
The "breadline" means different things to different people so we need a working definition.
Perhaps Mr Bee's approach of a healthy flat rate pension would work, and in theory is wonderfully simple (but I don't believe Civil Servants would allow it to remain simple).
It would also be costly, unless there are some controls in place. Given the current selection against the rich perhaps we could restrict the healthy State Pension pension to anyone receiving less than £100,000 in income after age 65 (play with the figures to get a realistic balance).
Or perhaps we should move away form the restrictive concept of structured pension schemes.
They are still very complex; they allow anomolies; and the language of pensions is odd.
For example, the Chancellor has just restricted the "tax relief" for those earning over £150,000. Tax relief is relief from tax and that is not granted on contributions. Tax is merely deferred until the income is received. Tax relief is obtained at retirement when part of the the pension entitlement is taken as Tax Free Cash. That is the only area of tax relief.
What the Chancellor has done is tax pension contributions at 20% and the eventual income will again be taxed, and probably at higher than basic rate for most of these people. There used to be principle that income was taxed only once - but principles can easily be overlooked if they are hidden in a smoke screen of verbiage.
Given that pensions can so easily be manipulated the time may be appropriate to consider whether they are truly relevant in their current form.
Many people have already started to vote with their feet by ignoring the pension concept and accumulating assets outside a restrictive regime and under their own control.
The problem is that these people tend to be the better off. Thought needs to be given to the options for the less well off.
Since 1987 pensions have taken a battering. If people believe that saving for retirement is important there should now be a healthy debate about the options.
And a healthy debate does not include making snide remarks about what other people have. Look forward not back - dump your preconceptions.
Sparky - Hopeless hopes.
10:05 | 04 May 2009
A message for Peter re "Warm up act". DO NOT HOLD YOUR BREATH.
Graham Willows - No change then --GORDON
10:16 | 04 May 2009
Same old "Son of the Manse"
Deceitful
Devious
Duplitious
What a Darling
clive foulkes - Pension Disinformation
20:48 | 04 May 2009
The pension system is in a mess unless of course you are a member of the civil service or local government. The benefits for these citizens is outy of all proportion to their contribution to Great Britain P.l.c. I apply no blame to them - They are UK citizens making the most of the good fortune which is thrown at them courtesy of Gordon Brown and his passion for state owner ship and control. I long foer the day when a pension is bought for its true purpose and not for the tax relief which it provides. I have contributed in the poast to a private pension and much no good it has done me. It has been an utter bloody waste of time. I believe I should be able to access all my fund, since my currewnt dtater of heralth is such that I am unlikely to benefit to the true extent of what my hard earned savings should provide. Hoe dare this ex Chancellor idiot and his rotton legislation discriminate against me. It isd a disgrace that amyone should be afforded the dubious benefit of tax relief, whe it really means that government departments shall control my future standard of living. It is no wonder that sensible people (bar those on the highest rate of tax) have too late realised that tyhe owner ship of capital provides freedom which no pension arrangement will ever provide.
Geoff James - Well said
09:24 | 05 May 2009
Well said - It is meddling of the worst sort - one sticky plaster over the next until everyone loses sight of the original purpose was.
I am surprised that the ACA is negative. Surely these changes keep them handsomely employed. That said I am pleased that they have spoken up.
The question of the MPs gold plated pension is still in my mind. If we use the Government multiplier then many MPs would get their pension caught in the £150K limit. Let me guess if this legislation applies to MPs.......
regards
Geoff
Bill Culshaw - 'unintended consequencies' pensions
15:32 | 05 May 2009
Whilst in opposition a labour research paper summarised the large surplusses then existing in many pension schemes, suggesting that this could be a "painless" source of funds for a future labour government to tap. Make no mistake the continual raids and eventual killing off of successful private final salary pension schemes has been a deliberate policy and nothing to do with "unintended consequences". Jill Kirby is right and steve bee is not at all a lone voice. The ending of tax exemption on dividends, the change in accounting conventions to require disclosure in company accounts of pension fund status, the insistence on the introduction of more portable pensions, and more and more government complication has all occurred on Gordon Browns watch....and now this budget! Does darling not understand human nature at all?
It is incredible to think that one of the most successful ways of ensuring a non-means-tested comfortable retirement pension for the average working man and woman has been destroyed by a Labour government, a Labour government!