November 2019

25Nov

UK. University staff strike over pensions and pay

Students across the UK face disruption as lecturers and support staff in 60 universities start an eight-day strike. Members of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) are taking action in two separate disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and conditions. The strikes will affect almost half of all UK universities. The universities say strikes are not the way forward and promise to do all they can to minimise the impact of industrial action on students. In addition...

November 25, 2019
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15Nov

UK. Have we reached “peak fintech”?

Fintech has become so ubiquitous you can’t go outside without seeing an advert for a new payments card or a new app for money transfers, pensions or investments. Not only that, the United Kingdom has over 1,600 fintech firms – a number which is forecast to more than double in the next decade – that employ over 75,000 people and have raised more than £12 billion over the last five years. For all the growth, however, the industry’s reach...

November 15, 2019
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14Nov

UK. Pensioners lose decades of savings in 24 hours

As part of a campaign called ScamSmart, the UK Financial Conduct Authority and The Pensions Regulator have revealed £82,000 (AU$154,202) is the average amount victims of pension scams lost in 2018. It would take an ordinary working saver 22 years to amass that amount, according to the FCA. Despite the significant cost of scams, 24% of people surveyed admitted to deciding on a pension offer within less than 24 hours. One of the main warning signs of a scam...

November 14, 2019
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13Nov

British expats face losing £50k with pension freeze

The 666,000 retired expats who live in Europe and a handful of countries further afield, such as the US, Jamaica and the Philippines see their payments regularly uprated. But 528,000 have their pensions frozen, the vast majority of them living in Commonwealth countries including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. The state pension only increases annually if a person lives in the European Economic Area (EEA), Gibraltar, Switzerland, and countries that have a social security agreement with the...

November 13, 2019
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13Nov

UK. Ex-charity head admits defrauding disabled workers’ pension scheme

The former head of a charity faces a substantial prison sentence after admitting to defrauding a pension scheme for workers with disabilities and using the money to buy houses in England and France. Patrick McLarry, 71, took more than £250,000 from the pension scheme of Yateley Industries for the Disabled and used it to buy homes for himself and his wife and pay off a debt over a pub lease. The Pensions Regulator (TPR), which brought the prosecution, said...

November 13, 2019
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08Nov

Sharpening the Teeth of EU Social Fundamental Rights? The Case of State Pension Age in the UK

By Hans van Meerten In this contribution I want to discuss an important and very topical EU Law element of the judgment regarding two claimants (Delve and Glynn), backed by BackTo60, versus the UK Department of Work and Pensions (hereafter: Delve and Glynn). Claimants argued inter alia that the UK State Pension Age (SPA)was discriminatory. I want to focus here not if SPA is discriminatory, but whether the (SPA) falls in the ambit of EU law. Didn’t the UK...

November 8, 2019
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04Nov

UK. NHS misses deadline for staff pension statements

The NHS missed its three-month deadline for issuing pension statements to more than 4,000 staff this year as the service struggles to cope with requests from doctors worried about tax bills. Between January and September, the NHS pension scheme received 15,200 requests from hospital consultants for an annual allowance statement, which is needed to assess their tax position. But one in four of those requests — or 3,824 — were not completed within the target timeframe, according to a...

November 4, 2019
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04Nov

Stewardship in the UK – The 2019 Draft Stewardship Code in Context

By Eva Micheler (London School of Economics - Law Department) The article interrogates the idea of creating a market for stewardship and identifies obstacles that stand in the way of such a market. In particular tax relief for pension investments deprives pension investors from an incentive to monitor investment and demand stewardship activity by their service providers. By granting tax relief the government has become a financial contributor to and a stakeholder in the financial services industry that services pensions....

November 4, 2019
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October 2019

31Oct

UK. Delivering pension dashboards

The inclusion of the pension dashboards among the announcements in the Queen’s Speech on October 14 was an important step forward for this initiative, reflecting support from the government and enabling the industry to move forward to deliver dashboards with renewed vigour and certainty. Read also UK. Retirement income gender gap is the biggest in a decade While it has been pointed out that a lack of government majority in parliament means the proposals contained in the pensions bill might...

October 31, 2019
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30Oct

UK. The worst pensions firms for transfers that take up to 62 days to release cash

Meanwhile, the quickest time is offered by Aviva at just 12 days, according to research. Consolidator service PensionBee analysed almost 52,000 transfers by customers who joined the firm since 2016, with the sample size for each provider ranging from 141 to 7,914 cases. It found that apart from Mercer, the slowest pension providers were Now Pensions, taking an average of 61 days, while Capita took 45, Willis Towers Watson took 42, and Smart Pension took 36. Overall, the average...

October 30, 2019
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