Archive for pensions
Danny Alexander fronts… a Liberal Democrat policy
Danny Alexander sometimes attracts a bit of criticism from party members for the number of times he’s done media appearances where he’s ended up spending much of the time defending Coalition policies which are predominantly Conservative. So good to see him out in the TV studios this morning fronting up a policy that the Liberal [...]
Public sector pensions: what you find if you ask the obvious question
In the debates over public sector pensions, it has been very common to have figures quoted that are supposed to show how low public sector pensions are on average. In better coverage this sometimes results in some juggling about of means and medians so that the ‘average’ quoted is more meaningful. What is usually lacking, [...]
Liberal Democrat members back pension changes but opposing making strikes harder
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 564 party members responded, and we are publishing the full results here over several days. According to our latest survey of paid-up party members, Liberal Democrats want to [...]
The most striking statistic from Liberal Democrat conference
Steve Webb, speaking to Lib Dem conference:
I found out that I was, indeed, the 11th different pensions minister in the last 14 years.
Public sector pensions: cuts amount to 7%
Robert Peston’s analysis of the proposed public sector pension reforms from John Hutton contains this key calculation: The estimate – made by the analyst John Ralfe – that the switch would save just £2bn a year, out of the estimated total annual cost of state pensions (much of which is hidden) of £30bn. That £30bn [...]
Curating news via Storify: John Hutton's public sector pensions report
I rather like how Storify works for pulling together online content about a news story. Selecting and sorting the following list took only a few minutes, and the end result makes for (I think – but let me know if you think otherwise!) a rather handy summary of the story:
Pension tax relief for most well off to be cut
News from the Treasury: The annual allowance for tax-privileged pension saving will be reduced from £255,000 to £50,000, and the lifetime allowance will be reduced from £1.8 million to £1.5 million. This will replace the complex proposal legislated for by the last Government in the Finance Act 2010. “Tax-privileged” is a tax break to you [...]
Public sector pensions: John Hutton’s views so far
I’ve not yet had time to fully digest all 176 pages of John Hutton’s interim report on the future of public sector pensions, but here are some parts which have stood out so far and look to be the key issues for the future: I have been struck both by the enormous complexity of the [...]
The coalition agreement: pensions and older people
Welcome to the fifteenth in a series of posts going through the full coalition agreement section by section. You can read the full coalition document here.
The story of this section in a nutshell is “short term good news, long term uncertainty”. In the short term pensions will get a good deal: “We will restore the earnings link [...]
Good news for pensioners
One mostly over-looked part of the coalition agreement is what it says on pensions:
We will restore the earnings link for the basic state pension from April 2011 with a “triple guarantee” that pensions are raised by the higher of earnings, prices or 2.5%, as proposed by the Liberal Democrats.
That, by the way, is a better [...]
