Category: Pensions

Automatic Enrolment – The next steps

The next steps in automatic enrolment The government has published a review on automatic enrolment in workplace pensions which makes important proposals for employers. Automatic enrolment of employees in workplace pensions has been a greater success than many predicted when it was introduced in October 2012. To date over nine million employees have been automatically…

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185 – Salary Sacrifice under the microscope

New rules for taxing many salary sacrifice arrangements came into force from 6 April. One of the employment trends of recent years has been to make employee remuneration more flexible. Instead of pay and, if you were lucky, a company car and healthcare, ‘cafeteria remuneration’ has become common, giving employees the choice of sacrificing pay…

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175 – Occupational Pension transfers rise 15% on average

Transfer values from final salary pension schemes ended 2016 15% higher than where they started, according to Xafinity Consulting, a pension and employee benefit consultant. The increase was largely due to changes in long-term interest rates: as rates fall, so transfer values increase (and vice versa). Long-term rates dropped sharply in the wake of the…

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169 – Govt U-Turn on Annuity Sales

The Treasury has changed its mind about allowing the sale of pension annuities. When pensions flexibility was announced in March 2014, one of the inevitable criticisms was that the reform came too late for those who had already turned their pension pot into an annuity. A year later the then Chancellor attempted to respond to…

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166 – Age related pension tax relief?

The pre-Autumn Statement rumour mill is suggesting a radical reform of pension contribution tax relief. Could tax relief for pension contributions be based on your age rather than the rate of income tax you pay? It may sound strange, but one idea doing the rounds is that tax relief on pension contributions should become a…

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165 – State Pension Age

The government has published an independent review on the state pension system. There was a time when it was all so simple: men drew their state pension from age 65 and women from age 60. That all started to change in the mid-1990s, when the Pensions Act 1995 set in train a phased increase in…

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158 – The Six Figure Pension Scheme

The fall in interest rates is boosting some pension transfer values. Pension scheme deficits have been hitting the headlines again, and not just those of BHS. The Bank of England's efforts to bolster the post-referendum economy have been to blame. On one widely quoted measure - the Pension Protection Fund's PPF7800 Index - the overall…

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Seek advice before drawing your retirement income

One of the UK's biggest insurance companies has withdrawn from the advisory annuity market. The pension freedom reforms revealed in the 2014 Budget claimed another victim last month as the Prudential announced it would no longer provide annuities via financial advisers. Earlier in the year two specialist annuity providers merged in the face of declining…

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No Pension at Swindon Town FC!

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has issued a warning to small companies that fail to heed 28-day warning notices to enrol their staff in pension schemes. The regulator states that firms could be hit with a fine that will rise with every passing day until they comply. 95% of small firms who are required to auto-enrol…

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