Pensioner benefits

Pensions, earnings and forthcoming challenges

This presentation was held at Netspar's International Pension Workshop in Leiden, the Netherlands

On Tuesday afternoon MPs in the House of Commons will debate the recent report by the Work and Pensions Select Committee on “intergenerational fairness”. This argued that triple lock indexation of the state pension should not continue beyond 2020 and pointed out that, for a given amount of spending on the state pension, there is a trade-off between the level of the state pension and the state pension age. This observation uses projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility to quantify this trade-off.

Presentation at UCEA Annual Higher Education Pensions Conference, London, 13 June 2016

The Treasury is quietly consulting on what could be one of the biggest single changes to the tax system in decades, Paul Johnson explains in The Times newspaper. The Treasury's consultation paper on pensions tax relief throws wide open the whole question of how we tax pensions. And what is the extraordinary change? Very simply, it would involve changing the point at which you pay income tax when you save in a pension.

In this article published in Accountancy Live magazine on 22 July 2015, Carl Emmerson explores the potential benefits and pitfalls of some of the proposed changes to the way pensions are taxed.

Paul Johnson looks at recent reforms to public sector pensions and asks whether we can expect more reforms to come in an article in Prospect magazine.

Paul Johnson, writing for The Conversation, says that the recent general election offered the electorate a big fiscal choice over dealing with the deficit, but we weren’t confronted with the big, longer term choices that we will have to make in response to growing pressures created by an ageing population. By 2020 public spending will be much more focused on health and pensions than it was in the year 2000. That trend will continue in the coming decades and it will mean tough choices on overall spending, tax rises and spending on health and pensions.

In his last Budget before the election, George Osborne announced a further liberalisation for those who have saved in defined contribution pensions. From April 2016, those who have purchased annuities will be able to sell them without facing the tax charges that currently apply. But who stands to be affected by this policy? Will they be able to make good decisions about whether or not to sell? And will there be anyone willing to buy their annuity from them? This Observation provides some initial thoughts and analysis to help assess what effect this policy might have.

Reforms to the NHS and the Teachers’ Pension Schemes are coming into effect tomorrow, 1 April, changing radically how pensions for members of these schemes are calculated. This Observation discusses which groups will lose most from these changes and highlights the fact that, despite these reforms, public service pensions remain much more generous on average than those available to most private sector employees.