It wouldn’t be the run up to the Budget without some discussion of pension tax relief. The last big mooted move was when someone decided to make pensions like ISAs a few years’ back ago. Arguably this time, the plan is more ambitious.
City AM suggests that the Budget could cut tax for younger people with this paid for by reductions in pension tax relief. Other suggestions include writing off student loans, and allowing councils to borrow more to build more homes. Clear blue water?
Widow’s parent Lloyd’s Banking Group has bought Zurich’s £15bn workplace pension book for an undisclosed sum. It would be very interesting to know how much the deal is worth. Now Widows may be mulling a bid for Standard Life’s corporate pension business according to Corporate Adviser.
A Deloitte report says that robo-advice globally will be bigger than the world’s largest fund firm BlackRock in ten years’ time.
The industry begins to voice fears that DB transfers could bring a repeat of 1980s pension misselling. If that’s true, it could wipe out a huge number of advice firms, but whose fault would it be? Either this is wild exaggeration, or I would place the blame firmly at the door of the regulator for fiddling while pensions were freed. This would be “mistakes we knew we were making’ times ten.
There is some discussion about how much adapting auto-enrolment to encourage more self employed involvement would cost the government. Standard Life’s Jamie Jenkins, chair of the AE Review’s advisory group, suggests that not all options are hugely costly. The argument does seem to boil down to whether somehow the government would contribute some NI to a pension – probably way too expensive – and the cost of tax relief which the government actually bears now – it’s just that many of the self employed don’t contribute. Anyway more to come when we see the recommendations of the AE review and presumably some tax changes for the self-employed.
Miton’s David Jane suggests investors may need to climb the wall of worry to benefit from continued market growth.
