Budget day is 16 March 2016. It has been much trailed in the press that a flat rate of pension tax relief is going to be introduced. The driver for this is to raise more revenue as the country is still running a budget deficit of about £70bn.
And so the seemingly inexorable erosion of the once great British funded pension system continues. Successive chancellors have all sought to see the funded pension schemes of this country as a cash cow to be chomped away at in their desperate search for new sources of revenue. Gordon Brown started it all in 1997 and it keeps getting worse.
But I have a plea for the Chancellor that would take this country to a much better place, one which does not operate a system of pension apartheid, one which does not pit ‘us against them’, one which promotes fairness and equality for all in their struggle to provide an income in retirement.
Why do we not scrap (un)funded defined benefit schemes, put everybody in the same boat so that we can all see what our endeavours are going to produce – one which does not bleed one group to provide for another?
Is this likely? Well there is more chance of George Osborne preserving the status quo for the current pension regime, but we can live in hope.
Philip Stevenson
Chartered financial planner,
Ark Financial Planning,
Stalybridge,
Cheshire
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