Pension policy shouldn’t be made a political issue
ANOTHER Cabinet reshuffle this week leaves us with another new minister looking after pensions policy in the UK.
And it will be another new minister with little or no previous experience in one of the most complex and important areas of Government policy.
There seems to have been a revolving door at the Department for Work and Pensions in recent years and Esther McVey’s appointment makes her the fifth MP to fill the role since Iain Duncan Smith was named in the post in 2010.
David Gauke, the previous incumbent, lasted just seven months – which unbelievably is actually longer than a few of his colleagues – before he was moved on to make way for the new minister, who was best known as a TV presenter before she entered Parliament for the first time in 2010. It seems a shame that Gauke wasn’t given more time to bed into his role.
Pensions policy is a hugely important part of the work that the Government do, more so now than at any other time in the recent past because of the pressures on the state pension system and the confusion over the flexibility rules that were introduced by George Osborne a few years ago.
I would have thought that it’s a bit of stability we need at the moment as consumers, pensioners and the financial services industry try to come to terms with these changes.
Instead, we have another new hand at the wheel.
I’ve said before that pensions are too important to be used as a political football and to gain votes at elections.
But that is what successive governments have done and this latest move suggests that things won’t be changing any time soon.
What we need to have is an all-party approach to the way we handle pension policy.
That includes everything from the way the state pension should be funded and when it should be paid to people to the way that we are able to access the money that we have in our private and company pensions and how we should build up these funds in the first place.
YOU should be able to use credit and debit cards without paying a fee from tomorrow. DON’T just pay the minimum payment on your credit card every month.