Hello again, hope you’re having a fine week, full of the prospect of good people and good times of the best possible sort.
But before we begin, a moment please as we remember Bill Vasilieff, founder of Novia and Selestia before that, who died on Sunday aged just 68. You’ll read much better eulogies and anecdotes from people who knew him better than me, but I will always remember fondly him taking me for lunch once in the relatively early days of the lang cat. There was wine, which is a good thing, but once Bill found out that I didn’t have the whole afternoon free and instead had to go and try to convince a platform that there used to be once called Cofunds to do some stuff with us, he didn’t do what most folk would do and ease off. No, he intensified the tasty, tasty vinous assault and by the time I stotted off to Mincing Lane I was in a state of some disrepair. When I asked him later on if he’d done that on purpose, he just grinned, and that’s how I choose to remember Bill. Gone too soon. RIP.
By the time you read this you’ll most likely be settling in to watch the Autumn Statement, which promises to be full of mists and mellow fruitfulness, along with A Lot of pensions stuff and various tax giveaways because now is definitely the time for that. So we might get an income tax or NI cut which I suppose will offset a bit of the frozen allowance fiscal drag (and I know I’m not the first to say it but if someone doesn’t start up a drag show called Fiscal Drag soon then I don’t know who we are any more as a country). We probably won’t get a corporation tax or VAT cut. IHT probably won’t get removed unless it does, depending on whether the spads think the votes of octogenarian Bufton-Tuftons or literally everyone else are more important to shore up at this point in the election apsodihpoijqp3i4…sorry, nodded off and headbutted the keyboard there.
Over on the pensions side, as Mike Barrett pointed out yesterday, a lot of pensions folk will be needing the coffee on by lunchtime due to Christmas Eve-style excitement about Pot for Life. “Hush now Timmy, the sooner you go to sleep the sooner Jeremy will come, spreading his libertarian individualistic cheer to all the good pensions boys and girls.”
(I am pretty sure I made a banner that said Pot for Life back around 1992, which just goes to show how ahead of pensions policy I was even then.) That aside, m’colleague, pensions simian Tom McPhail, who always gets enough beauty sleep, was of the opinion yesterday that this one feels like a done deal and so we can all now commence arguments about it.
Tom’s pretty much in favour, and you can hear why here. I’m not so sure. At least some of the reason for that is that I see first-hand what pensions admin looks like with just one (very good) scheme and just under 30 staff. It’s not straightforward, and there are few months where we’re not on the phone to our provider about something or other. I know the idea is that there would be a pensions clearing house like there is in Oz, but just saying there should be one won’t make it happen. Even if you say it really slowly and clearly, in a SAUSAGE EGG AND CHIPS way, it won’t magically appear.
And if one does get built, it’ll have to be paid for, which means either providers will have to stump up and it’ll never happen or it’ll be employers who get soaked for it. We’re lucky at the lang cat that we can withstand that sort of stuff, and if we can’t make pensions work given what we all do for a living then there’s no hope for anyone, but my goodness this will be putting the fear of god up whoever does the admin for the butcher’s shop down the road. Pensions admin for smaller businesses is a bowl of spaghetti, and while the world is big enough for everyone to have their pasta just the way they like it, there aren’t enough hours in the day to be picking out individual strands and arranging them nicely on the side.
My other reason for caution is the unseemly haste with which a bunch of providers who charge massively more than a typical AE scheme are jumping on this as great news for freeing savers from the restrictive yoke of paternalistic pensions hegemony that has straitjacketed the indsutijpoiajdshpoijadf…sorry, fell asleep again.
“The market will sort it out” say the folk who say that sort of thing, and maybe it will over time. But in the meantime certain truths remain self-evident: pensions are complicated if you don’t work with money, they involve waving goodbye to your money for decades and one way or another they are Not Fun, despite the best efforts of Pension Geeks and others. We’ve all seen what compounding of excess charges does over the decades, and I’m not sure I trust the industry to behave itself, Duty or no Duty.
But what do I know; this is probably going to happen and one of the most interesting things will be whether it gets kicked into the long grass if/when there is a change of government next year.
Meanwhile, in a world full of uncertainties, you can depend on your Update, which Cannot Be Stopped. For LIFE, siblings. For LIFE.
#LINKSFORLIFE
You’ll find your links below. And your music choice this week – well, I mentioned 1992 and so here’s my favourite song from maybe the best record released that year, which was Babe Rainbow by The House Of Love. Bet even those of you who are of the same vintage as me haven’t listened to Yer Eyes for a while, and the rest of you won’t have heard of it at all. You’re in for a treat.
