As a qualified actuary for over 30 years, including a period of 10 years as an academic, I must challenge that.
Back in 1985, I wrote a paper entitled Topical Pension Problems published in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries Students’ Society, forecasting the problems that we are actually seeing today, some three decades later. I wrote then that what the country needed was a real review of pensions – not just a review focusing on monetary concerns, but one that included long-term care provision funded by the government, possibly through some ring-fenced taxation of UK pension funds.
No problem is without a solution – it is just a matter of being creative, and sometimes brave, with the thinking, and finding it.
I want a root-and-branch approach taken to studying what the purpose of pensions is rather than just how much or how cost-effectively they can be paid. Naïve, I think not.
Dr Geraldine Kaye
Managing Director
Gaaps Actuarial
London
