Well, the curtain is just about down on the 2010 NAPF Conference here in Liverpool. Along with the rest of the delegates, pensions partner Neil Bowden and I have seen the great and the good of the pensions world over the last few days and picked up some recurring themes along the way, both inside and outside the conference hall. The future of private sector pensions, the thorny question of pension indexation, and the regulatory hot potato of enhanced transfer values all featured.
Archive for the ‘Political change’ Category
Lord Hutton, Steve Webb and Alan Rubenstein at the NAPF Conference 2010: What did we learn?
Friday, 8 October 2010RPI/CPI indexation for pensions – Oh what a mess!
Friday, 6 August 2010One week it’s the turn of the public sector and the next week it’s the private sector being told that CPI (the Consumer Prices Index), instead of RPI (the Retail Prices Index) will be used to calculate minimum:
(i) revaluation of pensions in deferment up to retirement age; and
(ii) indexation of pensions in payment.
But what does that mean in practice?
It’s the law of unintended consequences for many. For those pension schemes that have RPI hard-wired into their rules the implication is that members will receive the better of the two – one to comply with the rules, the other to comply with statute. Surely this cannot be intended? The policy seems to have been introduced to ease funding burdens, not increase them.
What will the Conservative/Lib Dem love-in mean for pensions?
Tuesday, 18 May 2010So, for better or for worse the Tories and Lib Dems have jumped into bed together. It’s a marriage of convenience, borne out of necessity and thrust into uncertain times. Undoubtedly, there are going to be choppy waters ahead. One test will certainly be pensions – and there are already some signs of what to expect.
Something new…something blue…
Tuesday, 9 February 2010I posted here about the things we knew (and the things we didn’t know) about the pension policies we might expect from an incoming Conservative government. We still have only an outline of their priorities but a speech launching the Conservative’s “New British Economic Model” last week gave us (to coin a phrase) something old, something new, something borrowed from the party blue.
The future’s blue …
Thursday, 5 November 2009With a general election looming in spring 2010, we’ve had a number of clients ask us where the political parties stand on pensions policy. I’ll come on to look at Labour and the Lib Dems in future posts on this blog, but let’s start with the Conservatives.
