HMG wants DC schemes to offer default retirement income solutions by 2027/2028. The population bulge approaching retirement is a good reason for moving quickly. But they also want trustees to be able to consider CDC decumulation options (so savers can pool longevity risk

Good that Jonathan Stapleton is pressing on this. If the rule change provisions and s37 changes are good policy, why not let them take effect on Royal Assent? They could also have regulated to lower the funding threshold under existing legislation, had they structured the Bill

The biggest change to how pension pots are accessed since George Osborne said "let me me clear, no one will have to buy an annuity". There's none of the theatre of that announcement, and no mischievous BBC journalists asking about Lambos. Pension freedom is not killed off, just

How would the Bill empower a Reform administration "to tell pension schemes they can't invest in net zero"? It allows the Government to prescribe asset classes that schemes must invest a minimum % of their assets in, not to prohibit investments. (In theory, you could get from

Surplus distribution: £160bn or £8bn? There's quite a gap between the "up to" number in Government press releases and the (inevitably v.uncertain) central estimate in the impact assessment.

Does this post mean Conservatives now oppose easier access to DB surpluses? Mel Stride was DWP Secretary of State when this was first proposed, and highlighted the measure in his (joint) foreword to the Feb 2024 consultation. That consultation paper said "any extraction of

29 May update from Office for Budget Responsibility👇 Unsurprisingly, they reiterate that policy will have to be clearer before wage and revenue effects of automatic enrolment changes get factored into fiscal forecasts. In other words, nothing is assumed to happen in the forecast period which runs to

1. Cliff-edge nature of WFP withdrawal = penal treatment of the pound of private pension income that takes you over the threshold. People near the threshold may want to manage drawdown income carefully. This could become a bigger problem in future if WFP payments are increased

Yes, based on the face of the Bill. No, based on what the impact assessment suggests will be in regulations.

After using "their bodies to simulate how a product might be used in real life", participants suggested that pension investment decisions be taken by something that sounds like a a citizens' jury.

OBR has revised up its long-term Triple Lock assumption a smidgen. Now assumed to be equivalent to earnings + 0.57% pa, rather than earnings + 0.53%. This will reflect plugging more recent data into the existing methodology.

The Government has updated its workplace pensions roadmap. It no longer implies that the Pension Protection Fund Board will have to wait until 2027 to cut levies to zero. Before and after. 👇

Good to see Torsten Bell highlighting the fall in number of hours at minimum wage to be automatically enrolled. His chart is a bit smoother than mine! (This isn't just because minimum wages have risen significantly; it's also because the earnings trigger has been frozen for >a

It goes without saying that @theifs reports are worth your time. This one by Jonathan Cribb, Heidi Karjalainen & Laurence O'Brien certainly is, not least for the analysis of how contribution changes affect take-home pay at various points of the income distribution. But as it has been

Why does the Government centre its comms around guessing an impossible-to-know number? (And if the answer is that this is what the media want, why do they indulge this?) Even if it's reasonable to suppose that the Bill's measures will boost returns/lower charges, how this

Some policy measures (facilitating DB run-on, encouraging DC annuitisation) could affect this trajectory of falling pension fund demand for gilts a bit, but HMG looks set to become more like Blanche Dubois. The new powers allowing the Government to mandate DC investment in

Interesting throwaway remark in the OBR report. One reason why I think the Government intends the reserve powers to work as a bluff. 👇

OBR on its State Pension Age assumptions 👇. They have to assume something and said this morning that the precise timetable doesn't affect the fiscal arithmetic much. But (a) The timetable for 68 and the long-term intention for % of adult life in retirement were indicated in 2017

From Mark Garnier's speech from the Conservative front bench last night.👇 This is a change from one of the previous Government's "core propositions" for surplus release from February 2024. DWP said then that: "Extracting surplus will not be conditional on use of funds for

What was this "nuclear intervention" that the Governor will "not have chosen lightly" to make? He responded to a question by referring to something he had said nine months ago (underlining that this was not a new intervention by saying "I've said before..."), which had made