BeeHive > BeeLines > 2009 > December > Pensions and the Empty Nesters
Pensions and the Empty Nesters
Well, and er, Hmm! Welcome back to the BeeHive after what I hope for you all was a relaxing Christmas break. It’s good to see you again.
I had plans for this first BeeLine of the year, but those plans were scuppered a bit when I heard about the renaming of the Personal Accounts scheme and I thought in case you hadn’t picked up on that yet I probably ought to cover that off today instead.
For those of you late to this story, or who like me are still struggling to surface after the holidays, a recap...
We’ve got some pretty important pension reforms going down right now. They’re kicking off from 2012 and being phased in over a number of years, but eventually millions of eligible employees will be auto-enrolled by their employers into something called a Qualifying Workplace Pension Scheme This is pretty big stuff; we’ve never had a law that says employers must run, and pay into, a private sector pension for their employees before, but soon we will have. That’s got like ‘Wow!’ written all over it, particularly when you consider that this legislation will eventually affect over a million employers in the UK.
Employers will be able to set up their own qualifying scheme, or make sure their existing schemes measure up to the required standard, but in case they don’t have or want their own scheme the Government have put in place a kind of default scheme that they can use. That default scheme was intended to be called the National Pension Savings Scheme (or NPSS) when it was first proposed, but that name got changed to Personal Accounts (or PA) instead. What’s just been announced is that the name Personal Accounts hasn’t made the course and is being replaced with a newer name; that new name is the National Employment Savings Trust (or NEST for short).
There’s a link here to the press release about it all if you’d like to read it
http://www.padeliveryauthority.org.uk/documents/press-release-nest-07-01-2010.pdf
and if you want to you can even watch a short informative video about how the new name came about; there’s a link to that here to save you searching the www for it (I know, we’re all heart...)
http://www.padeliveryauthority.org.uk/nest-video.asp
So, that’s the name all sorted I suppose. Now all we need is for the government guys to fix things so that the pension savings of low to moderate earners can’t be devalued by the unfortunate way pension savings currently interact with the means-tested entitlements that are provided for the elderly and we’ll be cooking on gas. It is, and always has been, the one piece of detail that needs to be addressed to ensure that these important reforms are a success. After all I doubt anyone would be too happy to get to retirement only to find that while they weren’t looking their hard-earned pension savings had flown the nest; would they?
8 January 2010
The information provided is based on our current understanding of the relevant legislation and regulations and may be subject to alteration as a result of changes in legislation or practice.
Bookmark this article what are these?
Notes
We are not responsible for the contents of any website, or any changes or updates to these sites, other than those owned by us. We are providing these website addresses only as a convenience, and does not imply our endorsement of the sites.
