Displaying items by tag: Lisa Webster

The removal of the lifetime allowance in the Budget was certainly an attention-grabbing headline.

We have heard a lot about vulnerable customers recently. Even before the Consumer Duty came along it was a big area of focus for the FCA and now we all have added responsibility under the duty.

As a professional, you will undoubtedly be aware of the effective 60% tax rate on income between £100,000 and £125,140 due to the loss of the personal allowance. For parents of 3 and 4-year-olds the real rate can be much higher.

As Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US, famously said: “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” When it comes to the realm of pension saving in the UK this is certainly true.

As we enter the new tax year we also enter a new era for pensions as I don’t think anyone, outside of government, saw the abolishment of the Lifetime Allowance (LTA) coming.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has been spending a lot of time recently looking at pensions. Before Christmas we had a paper on the tax treatment of pensions on death, and now they have followed this up with their blueprint for a better tax treatment of pensions.

Shortly before Christmas the IFS released its report 'Death and taxes and pensions', with the headline view that taxation of pensions on death was far too generous.

Back in its Financial Advice Market Review of 2016, the FCA recommended the Treasury should challenge the industry to make a Pensions Dashboard available to consumers by 2019. Even then the concept of a dashboard wasn’t new – the recommendation was made due to the limited progress that had been made to date.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen several announcements of big changes to income tax.

As the saying goes, nothing is certain except death and taxes. When you put the two together you get inheritance tax (IHT) and in my experience of the pension world the subject of IHT is also certain to come up on a regular basis – I’ve had two queries on the subject in the last two days.