Private pension increase from 55 in 2028?

veryintrigued

dunstonh wrote: »

The Treasury, less than 12 months ago, verified it is still coming.

Thanks for that.

Any link or more detail please?

dunstonh

Someone did post a link at the time but I can't find it (not that I have looked hard). It was confirmation from the Treasury that it and a few other changes were still planned to appear. Hopefully, that person can post it again.

It was along the lines that the pension age change was never meant to appear in the Finance act following the budget announcement in 2014. It was always going to be delayed until closer until the time and that the change would tie in from when the state pension reached 67 in 2028.

Some people have taken the failure of legislation yet to appear as a thought it may have been dropped. Of course, it still may get dropped. However, the fact it has not appeared is as intended.

zagfles

Terron wrote: »

A change to make pensions worse for people in the future is not going to be popular. Labour would immediately promise to scrap it. So it would have no effect other than to lose the Conservatives votes. I doubtHammond would be stupid enough to announce it. It is the sort of change that is only likely to be announced in the first budget after an election.

You really think so? Do you remember a huge controversy about the increase from 50 to 55? I don't. It wasn't an election issue.

Paul_Herring

You really think so? Do you remember a huge controversy about the increase from 50 to 55?

<whisper> WASPI </whisper>....

What? I didn't say a thing!!

Malthusian

WASPI has never campaigned about the minimum pension age going up to 55. Their thing was free money from everyone else, not the age at which they could access their own money. It was done and dusted 5 years before WASPI and 3 years before Ann Keen's proto-WASPI that launched a petition against the 2011 Pensions Act (of which no-one took any notice).

The minimum access age was irrelevant to WASPIs as they were all already past 55 anyway when it kicked off. (In 2015 the youngest WASPIs - as WASPI only wanted free money for women born in the 1950s - were 56.)

The government has another 10 years in which to do the paperwork and as others have said, there has been no indication they have changed their mind, nor has either side campaigned on a platform of reversing it.

Delaying the paperwork means they have the option to make it 60 or SPA minus five years. If they had put in place legislation to make it 58, they couldn't then raise it again without waiting a decent interval - too many people would have complained about them changing the rules twice. As it is they retain the option to change their mind.

Malthusian

The increase from 50 to 55 passed pretty much without any controversy at all. Anyone who was in the middle of the "cliff edge" (i.e. born between 1955 and 1960) could - and did - take their tax free cash before April 2010 and put the other 75% into an income drawdown plan. They retained the ability to draw taxable income from their income drawdown fund even though they were now below the minimum access age.

The same will almost certainly be true when the age goes up to 57 and with pension freedoms, there's even less reason to protest.

The only people who would have protested in the run-up to 2010 would have been those born after 1960 who planned to retire early between 50 and 55 and had put money into a pension before c. 2002-03 (when the plans were first mooted) expecting to live on it. But these people had plenty of time to put money in ISAs and unwrapped investments to tide them over those five years. Remember that ill health rules still applied, so people who needed to retire between 50 and 55 due to the black lung didn't have a problem.

There wasn't any controversy over the 5 year cliff edge so there certainly won't be any about a 2-year one.

Terron

zagfles wrote: »

You really think so? Do you remember a huge controversy about the increase from 50 to 55? I don't. It wasn't an election issue.

Pensions (and other things) getting worse for the young has become a more sensitive issue.

As I remember it the increase from 50 to 55 was part of a group of changes.
Anyway I didn't say it wouldn't happen, just that it wouldn't be announced this year - the budget after the next general election would be more likely.

Snakey

In the wider world most people don't have a hope of retiring at 57 or 58 any more than they do at 55, so although it's a big deal to those of us affected, if the general public are made aware of it at all a) it's likely to be presented to them by the media as being the closing of an overly-generous tax break/loophole unfairly available to "the very rich" and b) human nature is likely to make them generally positive towards it: "Since I can't retire early no matter what, I'm perfectly content to know that at least nobody else is able to either."

It's likely that if they tried to move it to the "five years below State pension age" a fair few people would have something to say about it - 60 is quite a common age for occupational pensions to kick in. They could probably get away with 58 though.

Let's hope that the relatively small number of people affected means minimal time or effort spent on it and they'll just do a "find and replace" on the previous legislation. Based on Malthusian's explanation of how it worked last time, the cliff-edge would be on 6 April 2028 and anyone turning 55 before then would have had a window of opportunity to press the button on their funds if they wanted. (No doubt to be followed some months later by bewildered outrage on the part of a dozy few who managed to have not "been told" anything about it.)

dessie360

As one of the minority who could be affected by this (I'm in the zone of hitting 55 in Nov 2027 and currently eating through savings scheduled to last me until then) - I've been eagerly scanning for updates in yesterday's Budget. Nothing to be found regarding private pension age increase, which is good news, right? Or am I naive to think it would be linked to The Budget and could drop as new legislation at any time? Thoughts?

dunstonh

dessie360 wrote: »

As one of the minority who could be affected by this (I'm in the zone of hitting 55 in Nov 2027 and currently eating through savings scheduled to last me until then) - I've been eagerly scanning for updates in yesterday's Budget. Nothing to be found regarding private pension age increase, which is good news, right? Or am I naive to think it would be linked to The Budget and could drop as new legislation at any time? Thoughts?

Nothing needed in the budget. The last comment from the Treasury was that it would be bolted onto a future finance act closer to the time.