Comment and Blogs
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.
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.
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.
• In his latest article, Martin Tilley looks at the decision-making process and the need for documentation as it applies to Small Self-Administered Schemes.