Comment and Blogs
Over the last few months, we’ve seen several announcements of big changes to income tax.
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.
Age 75 has been an important milestone in pension rules since A day in 2006. It was the latest age at which a compulsory annuity purchase was required (prior to Pensions Freedoms). It's arguably it’s long been an arbitrary line in the sand, noting that life expectancy has been on the increase for the last 20 years, but this trigger age has remained unchanged.
As we near the end of the year and look forward to 2025, it’s difficult not to reflect on the year to date. 2024 presented new challenges for the pension industry, most notably in respect of the implementation of the lifetime allowance abolishment and more recently, the announcement that from 2027, ‘unused’ pension benefits will be subject to inheritance tax.
As the England cricket team play their last home test series of the summer, I am reminded of a term popularised by the former England batsman Geoffrey Boycott.
It was announced on 16 December that Rachel Reeves was pressing pause on the second stage of the pensions review, a review that was expected to contain the long-awaited extension of auto-enrolment and measures to help the self-employed save for retirement.