Guaranteed Income for Retirees

Alan Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) on securing this debate. Although I have grey hair, I want to put it on the record that I am quite a way from pension age.

When I first heard of the Government’s pension freedom scheme, I thought it was a political gimmick. I hope that when the Minister sums up she will be able answer all the important questions raised and prove that it is a well thought out and evidenced policy. Otherwise, it is actually short-term isolated thinking.

If we take a step back, we see that when the original annuity system was introduced in the UK, life expectancy was considerably lower than it is today. Back then the state still felt a responsibility to try to ensure that people had a guaranteed income to look after themselves for the rest of their lives in some form of comfort. Just because the annuity system was not always maximised to the benefit of the saver—as we heard, 80% of people could have got a better deal if they had shopped around—does not mean we should scrap the system altogether. Instead, we should look at ways to improve it.

The recent message from the Government has been that people should save responsibly, and I agree. They have helped to force the issue with auto-enrolment. They have also said that people need to work or wait longer until they get their state pension. We are told that that is justified because life expectancy is much higher. There are contradictory messages: the left hand says, “Save. Be responsible. Understand that you might well have a nice long retirement to look forward to, consider and plan for,” but the right hand is saying, “Well done guys—you’ve worked hard. It’s your money—do what you want with it.” The Government should take cognisance of the fact that those are competing messages.

We have heard about the hidden unintended consequences of the pension freedom policy, one of which relates to the recent increases to the state pension age, which particularly affect women. Members will have been lobbied by Women Against State Pension Inequality. These women feel particularly hard done by: they planned to retire at a certain age, they worked all their lives with that plan in mind, but now they feel the opportunity has been taken away by the Government. Some women are now considering whether to access their pension pot early and effectively burn through it until they reach the increased state pension age. I am concerned for the women who stay on in work and, once they reach state pension age, retire and access their pension pot, who might feel that they have missed out by having to work longer and so be tempted to make best use of the money they have put by in a short time. That will not benefit them in the long run.

This is speculative, but another scenario I have considered is the fact that we currently have a housing shortage, combined with a Government who reinforce the message that home ownership is everything and is something to which families should aspire. If retirees have access to lump sums, they might want to access their pension pots to help their family out by getting them on the housing ladder. In the short term, helping their family looks like a good thing, but it will lock their money up for the future, so might not be right in terms of the long-term financial planning for retirees and their dependents. They are not, though, going to get that financial advice otherwise.

We have heard that the fundamental idea behind pension freedom is that we should trust people, but on balance that is not what the evidence suggests. The Government should look at the evidence from Australia and the United States, which suggests that a large percentage of pension savers spend all their money in a relatively short time. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, in Australia there are polar opposites in play: 40% of people use all their savings in just 11 years, while at the other extremity is a group of people who are too cautious and do not access their money to give themselves the high quality of life that they should have after saving responsibly. Reflecting that reality, Australia is now moving towards an annuity scheme. That is the red flag that the Government should be paying attention to. The Australian report was published before the Chancellor introduced the changes, so there is no excuse for not taking that evidence on board sooner.

There is more evidence of how people behave when given pension freedom from the United States, where half of retirees have spent their entire pension pot within 17 years of retirement—in real terms that is a really short amount of time. Overall, I fail to see the wider benefit of people having complete freedom when the evidence shows that pension contributions tend to be exhausted rather quickly. Aside from it giving a short-term feelgood factor for some people and a low-level cash injection to the economy because of the additional spend, I do not think complete freedom is the way to go.

I understand that populist policies are almost a necessary evil for Governments. As politicians, we all want to do things that make us popular, and Governments want to ensure that they are re-elected, but Governments should never forget that they have responsibilities. A default pension income for retirees would fall into the category of responsible governance; otherwise, there is a risk that future Governments will end up paying out more money in pensioner welfare. In all probability there will be a higher burden on the NHS because of the higher healthcare costs associated with retirees who have exhausted their funds—they are out and about less and they are stuck in homes that they might not be able to afford to heat. Those knock-on healthcare effects will have financial implications for the state in the long run. We know that the Government are hellbent on reducing the size of the state for the future, so that is counterintuitive. Again, the messages are contradictory.

There is very limited evidence in the public domain on how the new arrangements are working, but what evidence there is suggests that currently the majority of cash sums paid out go to people under 60 years old, and 80% goes to those under 65—so in many cases people well below state retirement age—yet only one in 10 people are accessing the Pension Wise service. At the very least, the Minister should consider the following. People should be given targeted financial guidance and advice before they access their pension funds. They should be made to think twice about making large cash withdrawals, especially when in some cases people are penalised by having to pay a higher tax rate, which again, is not beneficial in the long run. There should be mid-retirement health checks, although to be honest that might be too late for some, which is why we need reform sooner rather than later.

The Government must look again at what is happening now and come up with a compromise to ensure some form of guaranteed income for the future. They should consider the Australian Murray report and at least try to arrive at a mix of flexibility, which can be good for some people, and security for all retirees, so that they benefit from working hard and putting money by.