Retirement and pension arrangements in Britain: recent trends and prospects for the future

Rising longevity is likely to strengthen the recent trend toward later retirement, as well as encouraging the development of new-style company and occupational pension schemes, according to James Banks and Richard Blundell, researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Workers and firms may both favour schemes more friendly to job mobility in later life - in which retirement incomes are less linked to final salaries than in most existing defined benefit schemes, but which offer employees greater protection against unfavourable movements in financial markets than most existing defined contribution schemes.

This presentation at the festival of science from researchers at the ESRC Centre at IFS documents the pressures for change on retirement and pensioner income in Britain and examines their implications for future generations of pensioners.