Download or read book Department for Work and Pensions Public Consultation Better Workplace Pensions A Consultation on Charging Cm 8737 written by Great Britain: Department for Work and Pensions and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Government is proposing to introduce a system of automatic pensions transfers to help people to better keep track of their workplace pension savings. The majority of people being automatically enrolled are likely to join the default fund in defined contribution (DC) schemes. It is, therefore, important to ensure that these schemes deliver the best possible value for money. The impact of the charges levied on people's pensions savings over their lifetime can be significant - seemingly small variations in charges can result in a considerable difference in people's final retirement savings. A number of voluntary industry initiatives seeking to improve disclosure of charges information to scheme members and employers have been launched in an effort to reduce the complexity of the product. The Government welcomes these initiatives, but is interested in views on whether further action is required. There are a number of potential options: mandating disclosure to members by widening the disclosure requirements, to include information about charges; standardising disclosure to employers; or disclosure of transaction costs - require disclosure to members, employers, as well as trustees, and independent governance committees (as recommended by the OFT). The Government is also interested in hearing views on whether: a cap on pension scheme charges should be introduced; differential charging between active and deferred members should be banned in DC qualifying schemes; the ban on consultancy charges should be extended from AE schemes to all qualifying DC schemes; adviser commissions set up prior to the introduction of the Retail Distribution Review should be banned in qualifying schemes

Download or read book Governance and Best Practice in Workplace Pension Provision written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Improving Governance and Best Practice in Workplace Pensions written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The introduction of auto-enrolment makes rigorous pension scheme governance essential. This Report calls on the Government to reassess the case for establishing one body with sole responsibility for regulating workplace pensions. There are concerns over current gaps in regulation and the potential for further gaps to arise as a result of now having three regulators, the Pensions Regulator; and the new Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority, set up to replace the FSA. The Report argues that a single regulator is necessary to ensure that all members of workplace pension schemes are adequately and consistently protected. It also highlights that deferred-member charges and member-borne consultancy charges have the potential to cause serious consumer detriment. It recommends that both are banned by the Government, if significant progress is not made in the very near future by the industry towards ending them. There is particular concern about member-borne consultancy charges and those charges applied to deferred members - people who stop contributing to their pension scheme. The trend towards lower pension scheme charges is welcome. However, a good average is not sufficient and there is potential for consumer detriment in schemes that persist in retaining high charges. The Government should also regularly review its policy on capping charges for auto-enrolment schemes. Consumers are also continuing to lose out when they buy annuities because pension providers are not doing enough to ensure people are aware that they can shop around for the best annuity rate rather than being obliged to buy an annuity from their pension provider.

Download or read book Department for Work and Pensions Public Consultation Reshaping Workplace Pensions for Future Generations Cm 8710 written by Great Britain: Department for Work and Pensions and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reinvigorating workplace pensions1 published last November, the Government set out to explore whether there was scope for a new category of defined ambition (DA) pensions that would complement the defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) structures that currently dominate the market. Automatic enrolment and the single-tier State Pension will provide a firm foundation for saving for retirement. But if the current forms of DC pension saving become the default alternative to traditional DB, the pension income of future generations from workplace pensions will be more uncertain than for past generations. Over the last 12 months the DA project - a joint project between DWP and the pensions industry - has been exploring options in a middle ground. The Government proposes that the regulation of workplace pension schemes should not focus on the detail of benefit design but on what is important to the member: ensuring that any promise or guarantee, whether from the sponsoring employer or scheme, provider is delivered. This Government proposes to make it easier for employers to sponsor new pension schemes where benefits accrue on a specified basis (e.g. related to salary); and also to allow additional flexibilities for future accruals only within existing DB schemes, including the possibility of allowing a statutory override to facilitate these changes. The new flexibility will remove constraints from the existing legislative framework while still giving employees the certainty of a pension scheme where the benefits are defined (such as in relation to their salary) with the security of the promise being sponsored by their employer

Download or read book The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans written by James W. Russell and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential resource for workers navigating their retirement and pension options, from the labor organizer's perspective. Researching retirement plans should not take the rest of your life, even if deciphering the relevant paperwork seems to have become a full-time job. Deliberately elaborate legalese is obscuring the efforts of financial elites to seize control of workers' collective retirement savings—and The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans is here to translate. Neoliberal retirement reforms have escalated elites' efforts to replace guaranteed workplace retirement plans with weak 401(k)-like savings accounts and risky stock market investment schemes. The result is arguably the largest source of labor value expropriation over the last four decades. In light of all this, what do workers need to know as they assess their future prospects—especially in terms of the security their retirement plans may or may not bring? What should union activists keep in mind as they push for the national and workplace reforms needed to produce greater retirement security? This nuts-and-bolts book provides a much-needed demystification of the retirement system. Even more than that The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans enables us to take charge of our own personal futures, as a first step towards taking back what belongs to us all.

Download or read book Pensions and Legal Policy written by Amanda Cooke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the historical position of pensions law in the UK and the recent influences which have led to the introduction of Auto-Enrolment and subsequent reforms. Alternative models, such as the US and Australia, are also considered as well as the function of law in bringing about political changes. The question of saving for retirement is of national and international importance and many governments are wrestling with the issue of how to deal with the pension funding crisis. Consequently political policy has, in many cases, combined with behavioural science to inform new laws which have acted to shift the burden from the state into the private sector. Around the world responsibility is being moved onto individuals and employers as the state retreats from provision of state support in retirement; this book offers a sophisticated analysis of the role of legal intervention to facilitate this shift. The book explores the work of behavioural economics, its global influence on understanding financial decision-making and its application to legislation which seeks to influence consumer outcomes. Drawing on qualitative empirical research to explore the experience of implementation of Auto-Enrolment, this timely work considers the interaction with the work of behavioural science to highlight the social costs of the new regulatory regime.

Download or read book Better Pensions Better Jobs written by Mariano Bosch and published by Inter-American Development Bank. This book was released on 2013-10-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has reduced its inequality and poverty, and is looking towards the future with greater optimism than in the past. As the region grows, new problems appear that economic policymakers must address. How to provide adequate pensions for the elderly is one such problem. This book offers an analysis of pension systems from the perspective of the functioning of the regions labor markets. It clarifies why, more than half a century after pension systems were created, only a minority of workers in the region save for their pension in the contributory systems through payroll taxes. The study points out that the problem lies not only in the lack of coverage, but also in the low level of benefits, even of contributory pensions. It argues that to design public policies for pensions, it is essential to understand the complex web of interactions between employers and workers that take place in the labor market.

Download or read book Automatic enrolment in workplace pensions and the National Employment Savings Trust written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Government established NEST as a low-cost pension scheme to help deliver the auto-enrolment programme and to address a market failure in the pensions industry which meant that many employers and employees were unable to access low-cost, good quality pension provision. However, the Committee believes that certain restrictions placed on NEST will create complexity for employers and will disadvantage some employees. The Committee's report recommends that, if state aid rules allow, the Government should remove the following restrictions: the cap on the annual contributions an individual can make to a NEST scheme; and the ban on individuals transferring existing pension pots into NEST. The Committee further urges the Government to proceed with its plans for State Pension reform, introducing a flat-rate State Pension and reducing the level of means-testing without delay. The report also highlights the difficulties and complexity employers and employees currently face in comparing the fees and charges applied by pension providers and recommends that, from 2013 onwards, if some auto-enrolment schemes still have hidden charges, or charges that represent poor value for money, the Government should use its powers to intervene. Auto-enrolment will impose new costs and may be particularly challenging for small employers however the Committee considers that the Government has taken appropriate steps to minimise the impact on businesses through its gradual and flexible approach ("staging and phasing") to implementation. Exempting small employers would create significant complexity, as well as excluding many employees from the benefits of workplace pension saving

Download or read book Finance and Occupational Pensions written by Charles Sutcliffe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Occupational pensions are major participants in global financial markets with assets of well over $30 trillion, representing more than 40% of the assets of institutional investors. Some occupational pension funds control assets of over $400 billion, and the largest 300 occupational pension funds each have average assets of over $50 billion. The assets of UK pension funds are equivalent to UK GDP, and US pension fund assets are 83% of US GDP. These statistics highlight the importance of pension funds as major players in financial markets, and the need to understand the behaviour of these large institutional investors. Occupational pensions also play an important, but neglected, role in corporate finance. For example, US company pension schemes account for over 60% of company market value, and yet they are often ignored when analysing companies. This book is based on the substantial body of evidence available from around the world on a topic that has become increasingly important and controversial in recent years. Written for practitioners, students and academics, this book brings together and systematizes a very large international literature from financial economists, actuaries, practitioners, professional organizations, official documents and reports. The underlying focus is the application of the principles of financial economics to occupational pensions, including the work of Nobel laureates such as Merton, Markowitz, Modigliani, Miller and Sharpe, as well as Black. This book will give readers an up-to-date understanding of occupational pensions, the economic issues they face, and some suggestions of how these issues can be tackled. The first section explains the operation of defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, along with some descriptive statistics. The second section covers selected aspects of occupational pensions. The focus of these first two sections is on the economic and financial aspects of pensions, accompanied by some basic information on how they operate. This is followed by three further sections that analyse the investment of pension funds, the corporate finance implications of firms providing pensions for their employees, and annuities.

Download or read book OECD Pensions Outlook 2014 written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-08 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at pension reform, the role of private pensions and retirement savings. Population ageing and longevity risk is examined as are the means of increasing coverage and providing automatic enrolment.

Download or read book Personal accounts written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal Accounts : Fifth report of session 2006-07, Vol. 2: Oral and written Evidence

Download or read book Corporate Governance and Investment Management written by Roger M. Barker and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shareholder engagement with publicly listed companies is often seen as a key means to monitor corporate malpractices. In this book, the authors examine the corporate governance roles of key institutional investors in UK corporate equity, including pension funds, insurance companies, collective investment funds, hedge and private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds. They argue that institutions’ corporate governance roles are an instrument ultimately shaped by private interests and market forces, as well as law and regulatory obligations, and that policy-makers should not readily make assumptions regarding their effectiveness, or their alignment with public interest or social good.

Download or read book Pensions Imperilled written by Craig Berry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private pensions provision in the UK is in crisis, yet it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of UK pensions is due in fact to the peculiar way policy-makers have responded to wider social and economic change. Pensions are a mechanism for managing failed futures, yet this function is being impeded by the individualization of provision. This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, under-saving, and fund deficits, and in doing so have absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization and the state's role as facilitator and regulator in this regard, and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. By placing the UK system in a comparative context of pensions reform agendas across the world, this book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. It also presents a nuanced account of the extent to which the state acts to anchor the process of pensions rematerialization and, crucially, concludes by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Corporate Law written by Roman Tomasic and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Corporate Law provides an accessible overview of current research in the field, from an international and comparative perspective. In recent years there has been an explosion of corporate law research, as this area of law continues to develop rapidly throughout the world. Traditionally, Anglo–American corporate law theory has dominated debates and publications; however, this handbook readdresses the balance by exploring the treatment of corporate law in both Europe and Asia, as well developments in the US and UK. Bringing together a wide range of key thinkers in the field, this volume is divided into three main parts: Thinking about corporate law Corporate law principles and governance Some cross-cultural comparisons Providing up-to-date and authoritative articles covering all the key aspects of corporate law, this reference work is essential reading for advanced students, scholars and practitioners in the field.

Download or read book Investing for Dummies UK written by Tony Levene and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The easy way to demystify the intimidating world of investing in the UK market Think investing is only for the super-rich? Think again! Packed with tons of expert advice, Investing For Dummies UK 4th edition shows you step-by-step how to make sound, sensible investment choices—whatever your budget. All the major investment categories are covered for the smart beginner, while more advanced and alternative investments are presented for the more adventurous and experienced. Wherever you fall on the investing spectrum, there's something for you! This new UKeditionof Investing For Dummies has been updated with the latest financial information, including all the new trends and developments that have affected the world of investment, with an emphasis on the new pensions legislations and changes to Individual Savings Accounts. Whether you're interested in assessing your financial means, gauging risks and returns or increasing your personal wealth, with the help of this friendly guide, you no longer need to work in finance to make sense of the facts and figures behind your investments! Offers tips on how to minimize the risk of investment gambles Covers the FCA's more stringent risk analysis for investors using advisers Contains new sections on pensions, ISAs, the DIY/self-directed investor, and ultra-low interest rates Includes new online templates to help simplify the investing process If you want to go it alone in the investment arena, but need the support of a straightforward, reassuring guide to help you make the best decisions—and get the highest returns from your investments—this is the book for you.

Download or read book Working Better with Age written by OECD and published by Org. for Economic Cooperation & Development. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Currently, Japan has the highest old-age dependency ratio of all OECD countries, with a ratio in 2017 of over 50 persons aged 65 and above for every 100 persons aged 20 to 64. This ratio is projected to rise to 79 per hundred in 2050. The rapid population ageing in Japan is a major challenge for achieving further increases in living standards and ensuring the financial sustainability of public social expenditure. However, with the right policies in place, there is an opportunity to cope with this challenge by extending working lives and making better use of older workers' knowledge and skills. This report investigates policy issues and discusses actions to retain and incentivise the elderly to work more by further reforming retirement policies and seniority-wages, investing in skills to improve productivity and keeping up with labour market changes through training policy, and ensuring good working conditions for better health with tackling long-hours working culture.

Download or read book Flaws and Ceilings written by Christopher Coyne and published by London Publishing Partnership. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Price controls across many sectors are currently being hotly debated. New controls in the housing market, more onerous minimum wages, minimum prices for alcohol, and freezes on energy prices are very high up the agenda of most politicians at the moment. Even without any further controls, wages, university fees, railway fares and many financial products already have their prices at least partly determined by politicians rather than by supply and demand in the market. Indeed, barely a sector of the UK economy is unaffected in one way or another by government controls on prices. This book demonstrates why economists do not like price controls and shows why they are widely regarded as being amongst the most damaging political interventions in markets. The authors analyse, in a very readable fashion, the damage they cause. Crucially, the authors also explain why, despite universal criticism from economists, price controls are so popular amongst politicians.