OpinionJun 17 2020

Your Shout: Letters to the editor

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FCA stopping effective use of pension freedoms

Regarding your article ‘Steelworker blames FCA for killing DB transfer advice’ (May 29). The steelworker is correct.

As usual the Financial Conduct Authority have got it wrong. They are effectively stopping clients from using pension freedoms.

We all know the benefits of defined benefit schemes – income for life.

But how many clients use up the whole value of the funds?

It usually takes about 30 years to get the full income benefit based on the transfer valuation.

So a client would have to live to 97 if retiring at 67 to get full benefit.

The average life expectancy in the UK is about 81.

So who benefits from this – insurance companies, or the DB schemes themselves?

A lot of people want to pass on their pension funds to family when they die, which is not possible in most DB cases, other than about 50 per cent pension (usually) to the spouse.

Between the FCA and professional indemnity insurers, clients will no longer be able to access pension freedoms as they should be.

Also, clients will not pay high fees to not get what they actually want.

Would you?

Colin Tanner

Tanner Financial Advice

 

Compromise on SPA

I feel very strongly about the unfair treatment of women born in the 1950s, for the simple reason that throughout their working lives this generation never had the same equality as men.

Yet now, years later, the goal posts are moved to bring them equal to men on their retirement age. How can this be either fair or just?

If men and women are to be classed as equal at retirement age then surely women must have had the same finances as men when doing the same jobs.  

This would have allowed them to plan ahead for their retirement on an equal footing as men had throughout their working lives.

The women hardest hit are those born in the 1950s. Many of them have 30-plus years paid up national insurance contributions.

They have now had their pension ages increased. 

Women born in these years have also been vulnerable in this pandemic.

It is worth considering meeting women halfway, so that those women born in the 1950s receive their state pension age at 63. 

This would at least be a compromise, especially as there are now records that show the higher increased number of deaths in the elderly.

Many of these women could not afford to stock up on household essentials and were forced to go out to food shop more often as a result, therefore increasing the chance of them contracting coronavirus.

Given all the facts, is it not time that common sense prevails and a compromise on womens’ state pension age is reached? 

Name and address supplied

 

Contacting HMRC

Regarding your article ‘HMRC to go after company directors for furlough fraud’ (Jun 2).

I work for a bus company. During the Covid-19 crisis, drivers have been put on furlough on a five weeks working/three weeks furlough scheme.

Before details of furlough rules were made clear, the employers and union agreed that furloughed staff would be paid 80 per cent of their basic wage.

However, the rules state that the calculation should be made using the average hours the employee has worked in Feb 2019 or the tax year 2019-20, whichever is the greater sum. 

My P60 shows I worked an average of just under 43 hours a week. I was paid 80 per cent of my contracted hours (37 hours per week) – a shortfall of just under 18 hours at £10.81 for the three week period.

When this subject is brought up, and it has on several occasions by other drivers, the reply is always: “That’s what the union agreed”. The agreement was never put to its members.

I am now trying to find a way of letting HM Revenue & Customs know. 

I don’t believe my employers have acted fraudulently, but their error has cost me personally around £180 less tax and national insurance and I don’t think that’s right.

Paul Izard

 

Govt needs to prioritise 

Regarding your article ‘HMRC to go after company directors for furlough fraud’ (Jun 2).

If HMRC is prepared to spend time chasing after businesses that have allegedly broken the rules, why is it not prepared to spend time investigating the millions of new starters who have been totally abandoned by the furlough scheme. 

I personally started my new job on March 3. I was sent home on March 26.

I discovered that I was ineligible for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme shortly after as my RTI had been submitted after March 19.

I received a payslip on March 31 but all future payslips show £0.00.

I am not eligible for universal credit or jobseekers’ allowance. If I had been paid weekly instead of monthly I would have been eligible for the job retention scheme. How is that fair or even legal?

HMRC and the government should be concentrating on those that have fallen through the cracks of their hastily prepared schemes.

There will be plenty of time after the Covid 19 crisis to chase up those that haven’t abided by the rules. They should be getting their priorities right.

Leigh Iddison