Our DNA is clearly hard-wired to blame Margaret Thatcher for all our woes back to the Flood but it is facile to blame her alone for the state of our private pensions (Letters, November 10).
The pensions “holidays” taken by companies were largely in the 1990s after she had resigned.
Certainly Nigel Lawson taxed pension fund “surpluses”, but largely in response to Inland Revenue pressure to stop companies trying to use them as tax-free reserves. The long-term impact on funds of such holidays is estimated at £18.5bn.
Norman Lamont reduced the pension schemes tax credit in 1993, and Gordon Brown abolished it altogether, slightly offset by a reduced Corporation Tax, in 1997. It is generally accepted that this has impacted schemes by £5bn per year since 1997 (£70bn to date).
The stock market slumps of 2000/2003 and 2008/09 reduced scheme values by around a further £200bn, and are now causing historically-low savers’ interest rates. The previous policies of politicians and the Inland Revenue were clearly based on the ludicrous notion that share values would never fall – the Labour Government did not learn even from 2000/03 – and the mediocre performance of fund managers hardly reflects their own remuneration levels.
The actuarial profession must also take some blame for not recognising stock market volatility and ignoring increasing longevity until far too late by continuing to give massive annuities of 16% well into the 1990s. It also seems to have acquiesced in the misleadingly-named Minimum Funding Requirement of 1995, which was then downgraded by Labour to cover only about 50% of guaranteed liabilities.
Finally, I was wrong in my letter of November 8 to assume that the Coalition Government did not intend to improve public sector pensions even further at the expense of the private sector. The Prime Minister and Chief Secretary to the Treasury made clear in the Commons their intent that they will be “significantly more generous than their private sector equivalents” for the next 25 years. As Dr Ros Altmann of Saga (who knows more about pensions than all the MPs together) said: “The deal is a one-way bet for the public sector, they should grab it while they can, it does not offer certainty or fairness to the private sector or to taxpayers, who will be more exposed to risk than under the old system”.
This comes from a Coalition boasting we’re all in this together to deal with the deficit and national debt. Not only does the right hand not know what the left is doing, it doesn’t even know what it itself is doing.
John Birkett,
12 Horseleys Park,
St Andrews.
Andrew D Mowat rightly comments on the considerable damage Margaret Thatcher inflicted on the pension industry but fails to mention the much greater damage done by Gordon Brown in his first “prudent” year as Chancellor (Letters November 10).
He stripped the income of pension providers by £5 billion per year. As a result, to this day, private pensioners still suffer through reduced annual pension payments. There has never been any attempt by successive governments to reverse this unfair and highly damaging tax.
These cuts to pensions, taken together with the current miserly, protracted interest rates (from savers’ and pensioners’ point of view) greatly restrict any ability to spend as urged by the Government.
Nigel Dewar Gibb,
15 Kirklee Road, Glasgow.
I NOTE with anger that the chief executive of the Prudential is happy with the company’s ability to soften the impact of future financial crises (“Pru happy with buffer size”, The Herald, November 9). This could perhaps be explained by the swingeing reduction of with-profits bonuses inflicted upon its long term investors. Perhaps he would like to pop along to his customer services department (best not to phone) to revisit the Pru proactivity levels in response to complaints? In my case I experienced, first of all, apathy, then condescension, and ultimately hostility.
Ian Evans,
14 Craigends Road,
Glengarnock.
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