Seeing old people break down in tears isn’t nice. But then again I’d be pretty tearful, if the pension I’d been paying into for thirty years went missing. This, of course, is what has happened to many recently retired people. I’ve always said this is tantamount to theft, and Gordon Brown shouldn’t be allowed to escape blame.
In 1997, the then new man at the Treasury, announced that he would scrap tax relief on dividends paid into pension funds. Experts estimate that this has depleted the pension fund by something like £100 billion over the last 10 years. That by the way, is not a typo.
And now, The Times tells us that Gordon Brown was warned of these consequencies in advance. Papers released under new freedom of information laws reveal that the Chancellor…
…was warned that [the policy] would cost pension providers £4 billion a year, that pension benefits would be reduced, that local authority schemes would need to be topped up, leading to higher public spending, and that the value of existing pension funds could fall immediately by £50 billion. He was also warned that shares could drop by between 6 per cent and 20 per cent.
In fact, not only did Brown ignore officials, he also ignored warnings from within the government. One of the confidential policy documents states: “We agree that abolishing pension tax credits would make a big hole in pension scheme finances.”
So we can now accuse the Chancellor not just of destroying one of the most affluent pension funds in the world, but of setting about it deliberately.
02/04/2007 at 00:06 |
Oh, and I must say congrats to The Times for spending the last two years trying to get hold of the official advice. Now they finally have, it seems that Brown will suffer inj the opinion polls.