Osborne risks leaving advisers trailing behind

The last long-serving holder of the office, Gordon Brown, may have been a bit of a fiddler - to the extent that you sometimes had to delve deeply into his Budget reports to find out what was really going on.

Mr Brown also had an irritating habit of trumpeting minor concessions, for example extending the Isa regime for another year, as if they were important giveaways.

In many ways, we now have a similarly formidable chancellor. But he doesn’t do fiddling.

He is loud and proud about what he is doing. The reforms to Isas, CGT, buy-to-let, pension income and now, possibly, pension tax relief are blockbuster measures rather than half-hidden clauses.

Some of this radicalism is understandable. Certainly, under the current deficit reduction strategy and timetable, money is very tight. The liberalising reforms around retirement income seem to be as much about benefitting the Exchequer as giving retirees unrivalled flexibility.

In many ways, we now have a similarly formidable chancellor. But he doesn’t do fiddling. He is loud and proud about what he is doing. John Lappin

There is more of this on the way. In the round, if pension tax relief falls to a common denominator - let’s say on the low side at 28 per cent - it is probably fair to ask whether the current government is, in fact, good for your clients.

A lot of relatively generous tax reliefs that encouraged wealth accumulation and which were largely left alone under Labour have been, or look set to be reined, in.

There’s an argument that advisers are able to benefit from any change in the tax and regulatory framework, in that it helps demonstrate the value of advice and may make that advice more valuable, too.

But I suspect there is a significant compliance issue too.

Viewed from the point of view of financial planning, the pensions regime for higher-rate taxpayers represents a generous but also coherent way for people to accumulate pension wealth. Now those same taxpayers, i.e. the ones who can generally afford to sue if things go wrong - may be driven into other regimes – especially VCTs and EISs.

These products are an established part of financial planning. But the shift would mean taxpayers will have less money invested in what you might call more straightforward wrappers and conventional plans. It may also mean they move up the risk scale. Is that a good outcome?

Add in financial repression, global market volatility and concerns about achievable economic growth and rates of return, and it represents quite a cocktail of potential risks.

In addition, it is obvious that the FCA has struggled to keep up with this reforming chancellor.

You can hear the gears screeching as it tries to do so. In a couple of cases, regulations have trailed implementation by several months, a phenomenon I don’t recall happening in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Those who offer compliance services are doing their best to cope, but one gets the feeling that at times they are second guessing the Treasury and the FCA. Far from ideal.

I warned in my last column of the shifting sands of regulation, but it is just as important that regulators and advisers are able to keep up with pronouncements from above - in a way that does not jeopardise client outcomes.