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  • James Jones-Tinsley: Aiming for an advice-guidance sweetspot

    As Nikhil Rathi is reappointed as CEO of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for another five years, the FCA has set out its strategic direction for 2025/26, with important implications for financial advisers.

  • Martin Tilley: FCA must grapple growth v regulation question

    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.

  • Lisa Webster: Over-taxation of pensions remains an issue

    HMRC’s January pension schemes newsletter announced changes to tax codes for pensions, and a few headlines followed proclaiming HMRC had finally fixed the over-taxation issue. It would be fantastic if that was the case, but despite nearly 10 years of getting it wrong, the problem isn’t resolved yet.

  • Lisa Webster: Divorce impact on lump sums raises question

    The lifetime allowance may have been consigned to the annals of history but the various forms of protection are still relevant in the new world, especially when it comes to the amount of pension commencement lump sum (PCLS) that can be taken.

  • Martin Tilley: How education can tackle pension scams

    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.

Latest News
The FCA is set to take over regulation of claims management companies and estimated the cost to be in the region of £17m.

Pensions administration firm Trafalgar House has been appointment to the ITN Limited Pension Scheme.

The launch of a new FCA and TPR campaign to boost awareness of pensions scams has been welcomed by the profession.

SSAS veteran EBS Pensions has reported an 18% increase in client numbers to 16,600 and a significant increase in profitability in 2017 under new owners the Embark Group.

The use of the wrong platform to launch a petition against scrapping the pensions dashboard mean that the issue will not be debated in Parliament, despite surpassing 100,000 signatures.
 
The petition, which has so far reached 130,768 signatures, was set up on the 38 Degrees website, but to qualify for Parliamentary time petitions must be created on the official petition.parliament.uk website.

Aegon has slammed the process as “smacking of Yes, Minister bureaucracy.”
 
The petition calls on Work and Pensions Secretary, Esther McVey, to keep to previous Government pronouncements and to follow through with delivery of the pensions dashboard.
 


Normally once a petition reaches 100,000 signatures it is considered for debate in Parliament, but only if petitions filed use the Government’s petition service.
 
Kate Smith, head of pensions at Aegon, said: “It’s ridiculous in this digital age that the Government insists on people using its own petition service to get something debated in Parliament, and smacks of Yes, Minister bureaucracy.

“The pensions dashboard is an important consumer-facing initiative and one that is backed not only by the pension industry but by many others.

“The fact that over 130,000 people have signed the petition in a matter of weeks shows people’s passion for the pensions dashboard and has generated welcome publicity.

“The Government needs to acknowledge this and debate the issue in Parliament.”
New figures from the ONS, which point to a slowing of life expectancy increases, are good news for defined benefit pensions schemes, according to AJ Bell.

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