Download or read book Making automatic enrolment work written by Great Britain: Department for Work and Pensions and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current policy is that new duties will be staged in between 2012 and 2016, requiring all employers to designate a pension scheme into which all of their employees, aged between 22 and state pension age, should be automatically enrolled, so long as they are earning above an annual earnings threshold (the Pensions Act 2008 sets this at £5,035, equivalent to £5,732 in today's terms). Upon automatic enrolment, a minimum of eight per cent of earnings within a band would be contributed to the pension, with at least three per cent coming from the employer. This policy is designed to maximise private pension saving by individuals without imposing compulsion. The right to opt out will remain. This review looks at the scope of automatic enrolment and whether a new national pension scheme (National Employment Savings Trust or NEST) needs to be put in place for it to work. One of the most significant recommendations that it makes is that people should only be automatically enrolled once they reach the income tax threshold (which will increase to £7.475 in 2011) but that contributions should be on earnings in excess of the National Insurance earnings threshold (£5,715 in today's prices). There should be no changes to age thresholds and automatic enrolment duties should apply to all employers, regardless of size, as now. Employers should be given three months before auto-enrolment to ease the burden on companies. If staff choose to enrol before the three month period then companies will have to make contributions

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 Lifting the Restrictions on NEST written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For auto-enrolment to continue to work successfully, NEST must be allowed to thrive. Employers want simplicity. They want to be able to choose one pension scheme to cover all their employees. The cap on annual contributions to NEST means that employers can't opt for NEST for their higher-earners or if they want to make more generous contributions. So some employers are dismissing the NEST option and choosing a private pension provider who can offer a scheme for all their employees. NEST is required to be a low-cost scheme and to offer good value. Other pension providers don't have this same obligation. There is therefore a risk that the restrictions will mean some employees are prevented from having access to the best value pension scheme available. The Government has already made clear that it will need to "fix" the issue of transfers in and out of NEST if it wishes to implement its "pot follows member" solution to the current problem of small pension pots. Amongst recommendations made in the report is that the Government should make it a priority to gain certainty on the conditions for the European Commission's approval of state aid for NEST, to ensure that this is no longer perceived to be an obstacle to removing the restrictions. Auto-enrolment begins for medium and small employers from 2014. They will begin preparations a year to 18 months before then. Now is the time for action to be taken, it cannot wait until 2017.

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 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 The Single tier State Pension written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report welcomes the improvements in retirement income that the new Single-tier State Pension will bring. However, the key to the policy's successful implementation lies in the Government informing the public as soon as possible about how it will affect individuals. The Committee criticises the Government for hampering its scrutiny of the proposals. The Government not only imposed an extremely tight timetable, but brought forward the implementation date by a year, after the Committee had completed taking evidence. The Committee says that the Government must work with them to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible and that Defined Benefit pension schemes do not suffer as a result. The Government should also develop and publish a clear explanation of how means-tested support, including passported benefits, will operate under the Single-tier Pension, and the transitional protection that will be put in place. Many women born between 1952 and 1953 believed that they would suffer a double adverse effect on their State Pension income, arising from the increases in their State Pension Age combined with their ineligibility for the Single-tier Pension, if it was introduced in 2017 as set out in the White Paper. The Government should clarify the position. Some women did not build up their own NI record because they had an expectation that they would be able to rely on their husband's contributions to give them entitlement to a Basic State Pension. The Government should assess and publish the cost of allowing women in this position who are within 15 years of State Pension Age to retain this right

Download or read book Pension Reform written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Work and Pensions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2006-07-22 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pension Reform : Fourth report of session 2005-06, Vol. 2: Oral and written Evidence

Download or read book Pension Design and Structure written by Olivia S. Mitchell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employees are increasingly asked to make sophisticated decisions about their pension and healthcare plans. Yet recent research shows that the decisions 'real' people make are often not those of the careful and well-informed economic agent conventionally portrayed in economic research. Rather, decision-makers tend to operate with flawed information and make some of the most critical financial decisions of their lives lacking a full understanding of the options before them and the implications of their decisions. Pension Design and Structure explores the assumptions behind commonly-held theories of retirement decision-making, in order to draw out the consequences of frontier research in behavioral finance and economics for those interested in better design and structure of retirement pensions. Using large datasets newly provided by financial service firms and real-world experiments, this volume tests the hypotheses of this research. This is the first book to explore the implications of behavioral finance research for pensions and retirement studies. The authors blend cutting-edge research from several fields including Finance, Economics, Management, Sociology, and Psychology. The book will be of interest to pension plan participants and sponsors, financial service groups responsible for pensions, and retirement system regulators.

Download or read book In Defence of Welfare 2 written by Foster, Liam and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2015-04-17 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defence of Welfare 2 brings together nearly fifty short pieces from a diverse range of social policy academics and commentators, policy makers and journalists that focus on developments in ‘welfare’ over the last five years of Coalition Government. Following on from the successful publication In Defence of Welfare, (Social Policy Association 2011) published in response to the government's first Major Spending Review), this second volume reflects on the impact of recent welfare reforms and explores how inequalities in income, wealth and well-being have become firmly entrenched in society. It considers how welfare can and should develop going forward in order to promote a more equal society.

Download or read book Automatic written by William G. Gale and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Automatic offers an innovative new way to think about how Americans can save for retirement. Over the past quarter century, America's pension system has shifted away from defined benefit plans and toward defined contribution savings programs such as 401(k)s and IRAs. There is much to be done to improve the defined contribution system. Many workers fail to participate and those who do often contribute too little, invest the funds poorly, and are not adequately prepared to manage funds while in retirement. To resolve these problems, the authors propose that employees should be automatically enrolled into a 401(k) plan when they are hired, with the right to opt out, change the amount that they contribute, or change investment choices if they choose. If the employer does not sponsor a 401(k) or similar retirement plan, they would be enrolled in a payroll deduction Automatic IRA. This vision of a transformed defined contribution system incorporates key positive features of defined benefit plans to improve retirement security. Employess contributions would increase over time, their investments would benefit from professional management and rebalancing, and they would receive lifetime income upon retirement. These automatic features will make the 401(k) and similar plans a more effective tool for retirement saving, and they can be extended to the many workers who do not currently have access to an employer plan. In Automatic, the authors present proposals to implement automatic features in all phases of the 401(k) and in IRAs for workers with no employer plan. They also draw from the experience of countries that have implemented automatic saving structures.

Download or read book OECD Pensions Outlook 2012 written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition looks at pension reform during the crisis and beyond, the design of automatic adjustment mechanisms, reversals of systemic pension reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, coverage of private pension systems and guarantees indefined contribution pension systems.

Download or read book The Coalition Effect 2010 2015 written by Anthony Seldon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential verdict on Britain's first coalition government since the Second World War delivered by an unrivalled team of experts.

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 Harvard Law Review Volume 127 Number 6 April 2014 written by Harvard Law Review and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of Number 6 (Apr. 2014) include scholarly articles and student research, as well as as the extensive, annual survey of Developments in the Law. This year's subject is SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND GENDER IDENTITY. Topics include "Pro-Gay and Anti-Gay Speech in Schools," "Transgender Youth and Access to Gendered Spaces in Education," "Classification and Housing of Transgender Inmates in American Prisons," "Animus and Sexual Regulation," and "Progress Where You Might Least Expect It: The Military's Repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'" Each year, the special Developments issue serves, in effect, as a new and detailed book on a cutting-edge legal subject. The issue also includes an article by Jill C. Anderson, "Misreading Like a Lawyer: Cognitive Bias in Statutory Interpretation," and an article by Ryan Bubb & Richard H. Pildes, "How Behavioral Economics Trims Its Sails and Why." In addition, student case notes explore Recent Cases on such diverse subjects as false advertising by disseminating scientific literature, free speech rights of professors in public universities, voter identification laws, sentencing by imposing the condition of penile plethysmography, aiding and abetting violations in international law, and whether intercepting unencrypted wi-fi violates the Wiretap Act. A further student work explores the recent administrative policy of the Social Security Administration's eliminating a surgical requirement for changing trans individuals' gender designation, and another explores a recent administration white paper on national security and whether bulk metadata collection violates the USA PATRIOT Act. Finally, the issue features several summaries of Recent Publications. The Harvard Law Review is offered in a quality digital edition, featuring active Contents, linked notes, active URLs in notes, and proper ebook and Bluebook formatting. The contents of Number 6 (Apr. 2014) include scholarly essays by leading academic figures, as well as substantial student research. The Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. The organization is formally independent of the Harvard Law School. Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions.

Download or read book Improving transfers and dealing with small pension pots written by Great Britain: Department for Work and Pensions and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Government considers that a system of automatic transfers to the new employer's scheme is the favoured approach, and want to develop a model of automatic transfers that includes pots created in automatic enrolment only. They agree that there is a need to look at issues of consumer detriment and how the system might work where people have multiple jobs or gaps in employment. They will work with industry to explore the potential of a virtual pot solution, particularly to help those with larger pots to see all their savings in one place. They will also work alongside the pension industry's new working group which will be looking at the scope to make more immediate improvements to the current volutnary transfer framework. Short service refunds are to be abolished but the idea of allowing micro pot refunds in an automatic transfer solution is to be explored

Download or read book FCC Record written by United States. Federal Communications Commission and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Choosing Not to Choose written by Cass R. Sunstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely. Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active choice comes at a cost. In modern life the requirement to make active choices can often be overwhelming. So, across broad areas of our lives, from health plans to energy suppliers, many of us choose not to choose. By following our default options, we save ourselves the costs of making active choices. By setting those options, governments and corporations dictate the outcomes for when we decide by default. This is among the most significant ways in which they effect social change, yet we are just beginning to understand the power and impact of default rules. Many central questions remain unanswered: When should governments set such defaults, and when should they insist on active choices? How should such defaults be made? What makes some defaults successful while others fail? Cass R. Sunstein has long been at the forefront of developing public policy and regulation to use government power to encourage people to make better decisions. In this major new book, Choosing Not to Choose, he presents his most complete argument yet for how we should understand the value of choice, and when and how we should enable people to choose not to choose. The onset of big data gives corporations and governments the power to make ever more sophisticated decisions on our behalf, defaulting us to buy the goods we predictably want, or vote for the parties and policies we predictably support. As consumers we are starting to embrace the benefits this can bring. But should we? What will be the long-term effects of limiting our active choices on our agency? And can such personalized defaults be imported from the marketplace to politics and the law? Confronting the challenging future of data-driven decision-making, Sunstein presents a manifesto for how personalized defaults should be used to enhance, rather than restrict, our freedom and well-being.