August 2019

23Aug

Raising the retirement age to 75 won’t fix the UK’s pension problem

Like most developed countries across the world, the UK’s population is tipping rapidly into old age. By 2042, 24 per cent of people living in the UK will be aged 65 or older, up from 18 per cent in 2016. The all important ratio between working people and pensioners is shifting, and as a result, the weight of the financial burden is growing. Earlier this week, centre-right think tank The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), chaired by former secretary...

August 23, 2019
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22Aug

UK firm to unveil ‘abridged’ advice pension transfer tool

Digital financial advice firm Wealth Wizards is rolling out a tool to allow advisers to offer abridged advice around defined benefit (DB) pension transfers. Abridged advice, which was mentioned during a recent Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) consultation, is a concept that sees IFAs give a short form of advice that can only result in not to transfer DB pensions, based on a high-level assessment of a client’s circumstances. Wealth Wizards plans to offer the service to advisers as a...

August 22, 2019
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22Aug

UK.Comparing pensions is more complicated than it might seem

RUTH Wishart’s article (Principle on which we base the state pension is flawed, August 20) is itself seriously flawed. Ruth says “the whole principle on which we base the state pension is flawed at base camp by utilising a statutory cut-off point. Life expectancy varies by more than 10 years just between different districts in Scotland’s major cities”. Whilst true, this is but one of the of many factors that influence how many years (if any) an individual can...

August 22, 2019
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21Aug

UK. Pension age hike plan called ‘chilling and immoral’ by Baroness Ros Altmann

Tory Iain Duncan Smith's proposal to hike the pension age to 75 has been branded "chilling and immoral" - by a Tory former pensions minister. Ros Altmann said retraining people older than 50 to find jobs should be a greater priority than the plan, dreamed up by Mr Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank. The CSJ said the state pension age should rise to 70 by 2028, and then to 75 by 2035. Read also...

August 21, 2019
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21Aug

UK. Ruth Wishart: Principle on which we base the state pension is flawed

By Ruth Wishart YOU remember good old Iain. Chap who used to be leader of the Conservative Party till they found out he was pretty useless at it, so they got rid of him. The bloke who was put in charge of benefit reform and took years to come up with that model of equity and clarity: Universal Credit. Which turned out to create more anomalies than it was set up to solve. So they got rid of him....

August 21, 2019
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20Aug

How UK has worst elderly poverty in western Europe: Study

The proportion of elderly people who are living in severe poverty in the UK is five times what it was in 1986, the Pension Reforms and Old Age Inequalities in Europe report found. The rate has shot up from 0.9 percent to around 5 percent. Professor Bernhard Ebbinghaus of the University of Oxford blamed state pensions for the rise in poverty among people aged 65 and over. He told The Observer: “The UK is a good example of the...

August 20, 2019
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19Aug

UK. Fury as plan to work to 75 raises risk of death before retirement, pensioners say

A new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), fronted by former Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith, has proposed accelerating plans to increase the state pension age in order to boost the UK economy. The influential think-tank has hit out at the financial burden of the ageing population on public funds, and insists thousands of people aged 50 to 64-years-old are deemed “economically inactive”. One pensioners' group claimed the decision would mean more people would die before they reached...

August 19, 2019
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14Aug

UK Pension and Welfare Agency Is Looking Into Blockchain For Future Implementation

On August 9th in a blog post, the deputy director of digital payments and banking systems at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) made a statement that the DWP was looking for ways to revamp its payment systems in order to make them better adapted to the current economic situation in the country. Richard LAYCOCK said that implementing the blockchain would bring great benefit to the speed, efficiency, and cost of conducting millions of transactions every single day...

August 14, 2019
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12Aug

UK. City urged to attach ‘climate risk’ reports to pensions

Britain’s biggest companies, investors and pension funds must come clean to investors on the financial risks they face due to the climate crisis, MPs have said. The environmental audit committee (EAC) has called for the City of London to face mandatory climate reporting within the next three years to avoid jeopardising hundreds of billions of pounds worth of pension savings. The cross-party committee of MPs criticised ministers for failing to take specific steps to drive forward climate disclosure plans,...

August 12, 2019
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12Aug

UK. L&G in dash for all-in-one pension dashboard

Legal & General has jumped the gun on the government’s plans for a state-backed service enabling people to see all their pension entitlements on one web page and snapped up a private financial technology company attempting to provide a dashboard service. The insurer said it had bought the company behind My Future Now for an undisclosed sum and would be making its service available to customers and financial advisers. My Future Now was founded in Poole, Dorset, and enables...

August 12, 2019
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