Simple pensions please

WITH this year’s Budget less than a week away I really do hope the Chancellor Philip Hammond is going to do something to sort out the mess he and his predecessors have made of our pensions.

Continuous meddling with the rules surrounding the ages we can receive our pensions, both State and private, and the way we can take money out of our pensions when we stop work have made it virtually impossible for the ordinary person in the street to understand what’s best for them.

Successive chancellors have used pensions policy as a means of securing votes and this has led to a huge number of rule changes that mean pension legislation today bears no relation to the rules applied even ten years ago.

This makes it really difficult for people to plan properly for their retirement since they don’t know if what they do today will still be relevant tomorrow.

The vast majority of us rely on pension income when we stop work and, although we have 35 or so years to plan, most of us still leave it until the last minute to start. One of the reasons for that is that people are confused by the constantly changing pension rules.

Auto-enrolment has done a lot to increase general awareness of pensions and how they work but more still needs to be done.

Stopping using pensions as a political football and setting up an all-party committee to look at the best future for both private and state pensions would be good news from the Chancellor.