Posts tagged as pensions

09 Jun 2008

Making pension planning safer

In a FTfm article in the ‘Talking Head’ series of May 19 three authors of a paper presented to a recent World Bank conference in Washington DC likened the current state of defined contribution pension planning to the early stages of airplane design, when poorly understood technology led to crashes. They contrasted it with the present state of planning plane journeys, when safe outcomes are largely assured by the underlying engineering and the focus is on choices the travellers themselves make that best suit their preferences.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
25 Mar 2007

Competing with the national pensions saving scheme

The Association of British Insurers want the cap on annual contributions to the new ‘Personal Accounts’ to be lowered from the £5,000 limit proposed by the Government to £3,000, to prevent competition in the mainstream market for pensions – where their members operate. This was in a new paper (19th March). They want the scheme to plug the gaps in pension provision but not to poach existing provision.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
25 Nov 2006

The national pensions savings scheme: retail brands lose out – thank goodness

The Pensions Secretary has come out in favour of the Turner Commission’s recommendation to exclude competition between existing insurance company and bank brands for consumers’ semi-compulsory pension contributions when the new ‘national’ pensions scheme is introduced. If you do not believe governments are better organisers than private firms or better allocators of resources than public [...]

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
28 Sep 2006

Connections: regulation, the cost of advice, ’soft-compulsion’ pensions and posturing at the despatch box

Thursday’s despatch box spat between Brown and Osborne (the ‘effing’ word, thrown papers) was prompted by John Redwood daring to suggest (as part of his deregulation thought-leading role in the Conservative Party) that financial services consumers might be better off with lighter regulation or even an opt-out for riskier products. The Chancellor’s reposte was typical despatch box posturing: the Tories plan to abolish all consumer protection on pensions, mortgages, insurance and credit cards.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
19 Mar 2006

Government in pension misselling scandal

So says the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. It is rare to find government departments guilty of ‘maladministration’: it’s a hard charge to stick. It did not stick with Equitable, even though the DTI clearly was not up to the task of assessing the life company’s reserving adequacy, because the fault lay with Parliament’s mandate to the DTI not the DTI’s execution of its mandate. But in the case of the 80,000 people who lost their pension rights when their employer failed, there was no such excuse. In its desire to encourage pension scheme membership, the Government has repeatedly claimed that occupational pension scheme benefits were guaranteed. ‘Guaranteed’ is a term unscrupulous financial sales staff have played fast and furious with and lies behind all of the misselling scandals of recent memory.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
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