Bookmark Us
Register

Comment and Blogs

Back in its Financial Advice Market Review of 2016, the FCA recommended the Treasury should challenge the industry to make a Pensions Dashboard available to consumers by 2019. Even then the concept of a dashboard wasn’t new – the recommendation was made due to the limited progress that had been made to date.

As the England cricket team play their last home test series of the summer, I am reminded of a term popularised by the former England batsman Geoffrey Boycott.

As we near the end of the year and look forward to 2025, it’s difficult not to reflect on the year to date. 2024 presented new challenges for the pension industry, most notably in respect of the implementation of the lifetime allowance abolishment and more recently, the announcement that from 2027, ‘unused’ pension benefits will be subject to inheritance tax.

In late December, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tasked 10 regulators with removing ‘barriers to growth’ in order to attach the jump leads to the UK economy. On 16 January, the FCA wrote a letter to the Government to outline their plans to support the growth agenda.

It was announced on 16 December that Rachel Reeves was pressing pause on the second stage of the pensions review, a review that was expected to contain the long-awaited extension of auto-enrolment and measures to help the self-employed save for retirement.

The dark reality of pension scams is that we don’t really know how common they are. Fraud is a crime which tends to have low reporting events and with pension scams, it’s no different. The emotional toll can be as large as the financial, with some people being too embarrassed to report that they have been the victim of a scam.

  1. Martin Tilley: Avoiding SSAS admin nightmares
  2. Martin Tilley: Why are SSASs so unloved?
  3. Martin Tilley: Safeguarding against trustee problems
  4. Martin Tilley: Why SSAS rules undermine ESG

News from Twitter