People retiring may have swapped one set of financial risks for another in the government's "haste" to introduce new freedoms, shadow pensions minister Gregg McClymont has said in Edinburgh.
The coalition's continuing emphasis on its "guidance guarantee" only served to highlight the risks it was unleashing for retirees from next April when the requirement to buy an annuity, providing an income for life, is scrapped, Mr McClymont told the National Association of Pension Funds' Scottish conference.
"The annuities market didn't work as effectively as it should have fundamentally because buyers didn't exercise choice, they did not shop around in the numbers necessary to produce a competitive annuities market," Mr McClymont said. "What is the evidence that this new approach will be more effective, given that it appears to depend on the buyer exercising choice in the form of retirement products that they buy?"
The Cumbernauld Labour MP said income drawdown was likely to become much more popular but it had to be "equally well policed or regulated to ensure individuals are getting value for money."
He said the government expected 320,000 savers to take advantage of the new flexibilities, but "in the haste with which they have decided to go down this path, a haste which didn't involve any long gestation period, any calls for evidence, any real discussions with stakeholders, the government hasn't caught up with the potential implications of a significant change in behaviour."
Mike Weston, the new chief executive of the Pensions Infrastructure Platform, said that to raise £330 million from pension funds for infrastructure investment in two years was "a remarkable achievement" given that it had been run as an offshoot of the NAPF with no chief executive.
Its current target is £600m, and the bulk of the investment is in schools and hospitals.
Mr Weston said PIP was "not an exclusive club" and aimed to offer pension funds of all sizes access to infrastructure investment that was ideally suited for their long-term liabilities.
Three years ago, Chancellor George Osborne unveiled an agreement with the UK's largest pension funds which he said would bring £30bn of investment in major domestic infrastructure projects over a decade, apparently linked to a national infrastructure plan for major road and rail construction.
Mr Weston commented afterwards that pension funds needed projects to be low risk "which is essentially not construction".
He added: "If you look 10 or 15 years out, when PIP has grown signficantly larger, you could have a degree of diversification."
David Gordon of Towers Watson told the conference that the Scottish government was much more likely to vary income tax once its powers were extended in April 2016, and given the submissions to the Smith review.
Mr Gordon said the Labour party wanted a 15p discretion over income tax along with the ability to increase higher rates more than the basic rate, while the other parties all wanted complete income tax autonomy, with the LibDems adding inheritance and capital gains tax, and the SNP also including national insurance.
He added: "The more powers to vary are nuanced, the more likely they are to be used, as people might vote for increasing other people's taxes."
But Mr Gordon said there seemed little appetite, even in the SNP, for any changes to UK-wide state pensions.
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