5Saving for retirement
99.A number of changes are presenting new challenges to households saving for retirement. In particular, the ongoing shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pensions105 is placing more responsibility and risk on individuals in ensuring they have sufficient funds for retirement. Additionally, if forecasts that reduced productivity growth and low real interest rates will persist in the long term prove to be accurate, more income will need to be put aside in savings, in order to reach a given standard of living in retirement.106
100.The UK has a low state pension by the standards of other advanced economies,107 and hence reliance on private savings to bolster the incomes in retirement is greater. Baroness Ros Altmann, the Minister of State for Pensions from 2015 to 2016, told the Committee:
The problem we have here is that we have a very low state pension and it has to be supplemented by private pensions for most people in order to get a decent lifestyle later… Younger people are either going to be very poor in later life, if we do not plan in the longterm future to supplement the state pension, or future generations of taxpayers are going to have to subsidise them.108
The UK savings gap
101.The Government’s Automatic Enrolment Review 2017 reported that 12 million people in the UK are currently not saving enough for their retirement (or 38 per cent of those aged between 22 and the state pension age).109 According to the analysis, many of those under-savers are relatively high earners, but 1.6 million are forecast to have an income at the point they retire of less than £24,500 (in today’s earning terms). 5.7 million of the total 12 million under-savers are forecast to miss their retirement income targets by less than 20 per cent.110
102.The Review did find that there had been a substantial reduction in under-saving recently, due mainly to the introduction of automatic enrolment. As of November 2017, over 9 million employees had been automatically enrolled, while the opt-out rate was 9 per cent. Automatic enrolment had reduced the number of under-savers by an estimated 2 million, and the share of the youngest cohort that is under-saving from 48 per cent to 36 per cent.111 Automatic enrolment is considered in more detail below.
103.Witnesses to this inquiry agreed that the UK faced a long-term household savings gap. Ashwin Kumar, Chief Economist at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, told the Committee that “it is manifestly the case that so many people simply do not have enough pension savings”. Michael Johnson, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, agreed and added that there was an especially large savings gap for women:
Yes. Clearly there is a huge savings gap and it is particularly pertinent in respect of women … If we look at the number of women, for example, who are participating in some form of DC savings arrangement, it is roughly 3.5 million; in respect of men, it is nearly double that. If you look at the size of the respective pots, a typical woman’s pot at 60 or 65 is maybe £50,000 to £55,000; for men, it is more than double that.112
104.Nisha Arora, Director of Market Intelligence, Data and Analysis at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), told the Committee that its Financial Lives survey broadly confirmed this picture:
The people we spoke to feel that they have relatively little in their pots. Of the people, for example, who accessed a DC pension in the last two years, half agreed the pension income they had was not sufficient to live on … More women than men are relying on the state pension. That is both retirees and those due to retire. Fewer women—60%—have a private pension, compared to 70% of men. Average saving levels for women are less than for men. All this means that women told us they were less happy with the pension arrangements and more likely to worry they will not have enough money to last them into retirement.113
The Automatic Enrolment Review reports that, of the 1.6 million low earners who are under-saving for their retirements, 0.9 million are women and 0.7 million are men.114
105.As part of the Automatic Enrolment Review, the Government proposed a package of changes to automatic enrolment, including the removal of the Lower Earnings Limit that excludes the first £5,876 default pension contributions, and a reduction in the lower age limit from 22 to 18. The analysis found that these measures reduced under-saving, but only by 200,000. When the Committee asked Guy Opperman, the Minister for Pensions and Financial Inclusion, about the savings gap, he focused on the existing plans for automatic enrolment:
… Auto-enrolment and nudge theory have been absolutely a success and have addressed that particular problem of pension savings … it is not the ultimate solution but we are heading in the right direction.
… The [automatic enrolment] review itself, which we have adopted, sets out the particulars whereby it is reducing the age rate from 22 down to 18, changing the LEL, changing the £10,000 limit down to the first pound and addressing things in relation to low earners in particular. We believe those are the next steps… but the serious point is we need to get past 8% [default pension contribution rate]. We need to get to April 2019, get to 8% and review where we are in terms of opt-out. […] We have further to go, but we have a review and we have next steps planned… We cannot go any more quickly right now.115
106.Submissions to this inquiry recognised the early successes of automatic enrolment, and many agreed that there should be a focus on ensuring the smooth implementation of the planned increases in the default contribution rate.116 Torsten Bell, the Director of the Resolution Foundation, told the Committee that:
The most important thing that can be done right now is to make a success of auto-enrolment and that not going wrong. For all of us who were involved in the late 2000s and into the early 2010s, there are not many public policy triumphs; this is one.
[…]
The risk is that we have been seeing very low opt-out rates from auto-enrolment. That is partly [because] the level of contributions are tiny at the moment and are going to go up a lot over the next few years… For a typical earner, it may well be that all of their earnings growth is taken in increased auto-enrolment contributions, so they will see no take-home pay increase. We all think it is a good thing that they are saving more—we support the policy—but we want to think hard about what that is going to do to the opt-out rates from it, particularly for the groups that we have seen real successes among, the young and women… I would be seriously thinking about whether we are doing everything we can to reduce the chance of opt-out.117
107.Despite the welcome and significant boost to savings rates achieved by automatic enrolment, millions of people are still expected to under-save for their pensions on current policies, many of them to a significant extent. Further reforms to the pensions saving landscape and automatic enrolment will be required to ensure that households have sufficient income in retirement.
108.The Committee is concerned by the evidence it has received that this savings gap is particularly large among women. The Treasury should assess what is driving this gap, and what the consequences could be for both individuals and households.
109.Auto-enrolment has, to date, been enormously successful. The Government is right to focus on ensuring that existing plans for raising the default contribution rate go smoothly. However, looking beyond that, there is little evidence of a plan, or even an ambition, to reduce further the number of under-savers from its current level of 12 million. If the Government has reasons to think that current levels of under-saving are acceptable, then it should say so and explain why.
Tax relief on pensions
110.The main financial incentive that the Government provides for long-term saving is tax relief on pension contributions. In 2016/17, the cost to the taxpayer of income tax and NICs relief on pensions was around £41 billion.118 The tax relief offered has become less generous in recent years, with the annual allowance currently £40,000, against £255,000 in 2010/11. Meanwhile, the lifetime allowance has fallen from £1.8 million to £1.03 million. Additionally, the annual allowance has been tapered for high earners since 2016, and the money purchase allowance was introduced alongside pension freedoms. In 2015, the Treasury consulted on reform of pensions tax relief, but no fundamental changes were announced at the subsequent Budget.119
111.As was the case with cash savings,120 there was widespread scepticism among witnesses to the Committee about the effectiveness and fairness of tax relief in incentivising pension saving. Baroness Altmann told the Committee:
Tax relief is poorly understood and poorly targeted … If you wanted to encourage lots of taxpayer spending to incentivise saving, the people you would normally most want to incentivise are those who have least ability to save. The way tax relief works, of course, gives most incentive to those who are at the top end. I have done research in the past on this and most people do not have a clue how much money they get from tax relief, what it is worth to them and what it even means. Indeed, in some cases, those people who have no financial education at all, when they hear “tax relief”, think it is some kind of tax and not a good thing but a bad thing. The 20% tax relief is equivalent to a 25% bonus from the Government—free money.121
In 2015/16, 52 per cent of the total income tax relief paid on pension contributions went to individuals earning £50,000 or above, up slightly from 49% in 2010/11; but the share going to those earning £500,000 and above fell from 5 to 3 per cent.122
Chart 5.1 Cumulative distribution of pensions tax relief among income taxpayers 2015/16. The chart shows the share of the total amount given in tax relief on pensions to taxpayers at or below a given gross income percentiles. It includes only individuals that pay income tax.
Sources: HM Revenue & Customs, Personal incomes statistics 2015/16 (tables 3.3 and 3.8), 28 March 2018; and Treasury Committee staff calculations
112.Michelle Cracknell, the Chief Executive of the Pensions Advisory Service told the Committee that, even among the relatively engaged pool of people that contact her organisation, tax relief and other benefits of pension saving are poorly understood:
When people contact us, they are aware that they need to do something in respect of their pension, but they find the barriers too high and it is a combination of lack of knowledge and lack of confidence. We find that a lot of people miss out on opportunities and so do not get the most out of the tax reliefs or they do not get the benefit from employer contributions because of misunderstandings.
[…]
Looking at the automatic enrolment population or where we do outreach work, it is fair to say that tax relief has very little meaning to people, although they do get the concept that if you put one in, the employer will put in one as well and you will get a bit from the Government.123
113.Michael Johnson strongly criticised the cost and effectiveness of tax relief and advocated its abolition:
[There] is a fundamental question that countries around the globe are struggling with, which is: do financial incentives actually work? I am coming round to the idea, having done a fair amount of research on this, that the answer is no. […]
I would scrap all pensions tax relief, including employer NICs rebates. That creates a cash flow of about £46 billion a year. I would introduce a bonus structure that is an incentive disconnected from your tax-paying status … I would also bring down the annual allowance from today’s £40,000, which is irrelevant to virtually everybody in the country, to a number between £8,000 and £10,000. I would abandon the lifetime allowance as a quid pro quo, because it is essentially manna from heaven for consultants and does not do a great deal for everybody else. […]124
114.However, other witnesses were more cautious about the feasibility of reform at this scale, and advocated more incremental steps.125 For Sir Steve Webb, the Minister of State for Pensions from 2010–15 and now Director of Policy at Royal London, such steps could include a reduction in the annual allowance and abolition of the lifetime allowance:
In terms of incremental reform, it has become hideously complicated… so simplification would be the most important thing. Instead of having an annual allowance, a tapered annual allowance, a lifetime allowance, have a simple, perhaps lower, if necessary, annual allowance. Having an annual allowance and a lifetime allowance seems odd; you are capped on the way in and on the way out, and the lifetime allowance is a cap on success …
[You should also] stop tinkering. We have had six cuts to limits on tax relief in seven years. That keeps financial advisers up all night trying to keep up with everything, and it means the public have no idea what the rules are, which keep changing… In terms of big-bang reform, it would be very difficult to do because of huge numbers of gainers and losers.126
Written submissions to the inquiry from the pensions industry also called for a period of stability in the pensions tax relief system.127
115.Other witnesses advocated replacing the current system with a flat rate of tax relief for all incomes. Ashwin Kumar said that “I cannot see any justification for it being higher than the basic rate of tax”128 while Baroness Altman told the Committee “my preference would be for everybody to get the same incentive for the same contribution”. Baroness Altmann also suggested that “It would be really helpful and more effective if we were able to badge tax relief as a Government bonus on your pension or the Government contribution to your pension”.129
116.John Glen, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, acknowledged the debate around further reform of tax relief, but did not commit to going further:
[Reductions to the annual and lifetime allowances has been] a significant journey to change the whole incentives and tax relief. I recognise that there are a range of opinions about how much further that could go and what the appropriate contribution is that the state should be making to incentivise, but we have to see it against that starting point.
You are right to say that there are other ways of looking at this in terms of whether it should go further or whether it should be a flat rate. These debates have been out there for a long time. There is, however, also an issue around stability, and we have got to a place now where we are saving, I think, £6 billion from the changes that we have made and, arguably, a lot of that was going to subsidise wealthy people’s pensions.130
117.There is widespread acknowledgement that tax relief is not an effective or well-targeted way of incentivising saving into pensions. Ultimately, the Government may want to return to the question of whether there should be fundamental reform. However, the existing state of affairs could be improved through further, incremental changes. In particular, the Government should give serious consideration to replacing the lifetime allowance with a lower annual allowance, introducing a flat rate of relief, and promoting understanding of tax relief as a bonus or additional contribution.
The Lifetime ISA
118.At Budget 2016, a new long-term savings product, the Lifetime ISA (LISA), was announced. Although it borrows the long-established label “ISA”, the LISA is effectively a combination of a long-term pensions saving vehicle and the Right to Buy ISA, which it is due to replace.131 As implemented, it allows participants to save up to £4,000 each year until they are 50, in stocks and shares or cash, with the Government awarding a 25% bonus each year. The investment can be withdrawn without charge for the purposes of buying a first home costing no more than £450,000, or after the age of 60. If it is withdrawn early, there is a 25 per cent charge on the entire investment.
119.The LISA represents a step towards replacing tax relief with matching bonus incentives. However, it was strongly criticised by many witnesses to this inquiry for its complexity and its inconsistency with the other parts of the long-term savings landscape. Sir Steve (former minister and now Royal London) said:
When the lifetime ISA was announced, it felt like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We had autoenrolment, where the 20somethings and the 30somethings are the most likely to stay in; there are well over 2 million under-40s now in workplace pensions who were not before. We already had Help to Buy ISAs, so if you think that those sorts of schemes help and do not just ramp up house prices, we had one of those already. We had workplace pensions finally getting young people into pension-saving, albeit at a modest level and then, suddenly, we get this strange hybrid.
The original worry was people would choose lifetime ISAs and opt out of the workplace pension, giving up employer contributions and tax relief and so on. In fact, it has been a bit of a flop … The market for the providers that provided the stocks and shares ISA was the children of rich parents. You have a rich parent who cannot use up all their pension tax limits any more, has some cash, gives it to junior, junior gets £1,000 off the Government. That does not seem, to me, to be the priority group for Government spending, so that did not really work …
Perhaps for the selfemployed, who are not getting an employer contribution, you might think this might be relevant, but what we know about the selfemployed is they quite like the idea of accessing their cash. Of course, in a LISA, yes, they can, sort of, but there is a hefty penalty, so it is not quite clear what question the LISA is the answer to.132
Baroness Altmann advocated the LISA’s abolition:
… I would urge the Committee to recommend abolishing the lifetime ISA; just scrap it. It is, in my view—and I have seen this for so many decades—another mis-selling scandal waiting to happen. That is why a lot of providers did not offer it …
First, the lifetime ISA confuses house purchase with pension in a very unhelpful way. Secondly, lifetime ISAs have the wrong behavioural incentives. First of all, the contributions stop at age 50. Actually, most people can start affording a bit more than that, but if you are in the lifetime ISA as a retirement-savings vehicle, come age 50 you will think, “I have done that. That is me sorted,” so you will not do any more. [Secondly], unlike the lifetime ISA, where you can get your hands on the money tax-free at age 60, the pension has built-in disincentives for you to spend it too early; you face big tax penalties… If people start relying on ISAs and LISAs for retirement, they are bound to be pretty poor in their 80s.133
120.The written evidence received by the Committee indicated that the Lifetime ISA was also unpopular in the financial services industry. UK Finance wrote that it “has yet to prove popular with providers and has therefore seen limited take up by customers … we also have concerns on where LISA fits in the overall savings landscape… [and] would encourage the Government to consider extending the Help to Buy”.134 As further evidence of the LISA’s limited take up among pensions savers, the Pensions Advisory Service told the Committee that they have received no questions where the substantial part was about LISAs, and only three online queries since April 2017 (of 25,000) that mentioned the LISA at all.135
121.At a hearing for this inquiry, the Committee raised the specific problem of the charging structure for the LISA with John Glen. It was put to him that, since the Government awards a 25 per cent bonus to LISA savings, it may seem to investors the 25 per cent charge would only amount to the loss of the bonus. In fact, the charge applies to the total investment, including the principal and any growth. This means that the investment principal is at risk, since if there were no growth, an early withdrawal would result both in the loss of the investment, and 6.25 per cent of the principal. This had not been explained on the LISA pages on the gov.uk website. In a subsequent letter, Mr Glenn agreed that this was a valid point, and said that appropriate changes to the website would be made. As of 18 July 2018, these changes had not been made. The Committee welcomes this commitment, and would like to see it fulfilled as soon as possible.136
122.This inquiry has received strong criticism of the Lifetime ISA (LISA) over its complexity, its perverse incentives, its lack of complementarity with the pensions saving landscape and its apparent lack of popularity with the industry and pension savers. The Government should abolish it.
123.In promoting the LISA to retail investors, the Government has not been clear enough that those withdrawing their money early lose not only the 25 per cent bonus, but also a fraction of their capital. In this respect, the standards of disclosure on the gov.uk website fall far below those expected of regulated firms. The Committee welcomes the Minister’s commitment to clarifying the website, but it is deeply disappointed that it has not yet been done, two months after the Minister promised to do so.
Increasing savings under automatic enrolment—auto-escalation and self-employment
124.As outlined above, many of those who gave evidence to the Committee on automatic enrolment emphasised the need to consolidate its early success, and ensure the smooth implementation of the planned increases in the default contribution rate. Nonetheless, two main areas of reform were highlighted that could make a contribution to closing further the saving gap.
125.The first of these was automatic escalation, which expands on the “nudge” principle by linking future rises in the default contribution rate above 8 per cent to individuals’ increases in pay. Sir Steve told the Committee:
… if you are on a low wage and you get a state pension, [8 per cent] is enough, but it is not enough for people much beyond that. […] I believe we should keep the 8 per cent where it is, but in behavioural economics there is the “save more tomorrow” idea. Every time you get a pay rise, that 8 per cent becomes 8.5 per cent, then 9 per cent. It just steps up, because the most painless time to put more in a pension is when you have had a pay rise—money you have never had… Any other things we might come up with, such as incentives, advertising, education and so on, are tiny compared with auto-enrolment, defaults and nudges. It works.
Baroness Altmann agreed that automatic escalation with pay rises makes sense but added “there is nothing to stop the pensions industry recommending people to do that and talking to employers about doing that now … it does not need legislation.”137
126.While maintaining its focus on keeping opt-outs from automatic enrolment low during the rise in the contribution rate to 8 per cent, the Government should start considering the options for raising contribution rates for at least some people beyond that point, potentially by automatically escalating individual contribution rates in line with pay rises. This option and any alternatives should be analysed at the next automatic enrolment review.
127.The second area of reform concerns the growing numbers of self-employed, including “gig economy” workers, who are not covered by auto-enrolment. Witnesses to this inquiry widely agreed that there is a need to address this issue. Michelle Cracknell said she was concerned about the lack of engagement among the self-employed with pension saving:
[The Pensions Advisory Service] are currently doing some work on trying to understand how to reach the self-employed. The reason for that is the number of people who contact us who are self-employed, out of our 205,000, is only 8 per cent, which is incredibly low when you think that those people have no other support mechanism … At the moment, the majority of the self-employed people who contact us have previously had an employment experience, so they have in their mind already an idea that they do need to provide something out of their pay that covers benefits and pension, etcetera. Again, it is quite worrying that with an increasing number of people going into self-employment, in the broadest definition of the word, they do not have any grounding as to how they should apportion their pay.138
128.Ashwin Kumar and Torsten Bell also argued that the exclusion of the self-employed from automatic enrolment system had exacerbated the incentives for employers to create pseudo-self-employment roles, without the degree of autonomy normally associated with self-employment, in order to benefit from lower taxes.139
129.When asked whether the Government should get on with moving the self-employed into automatic enrolment, Sir Steve answered:
Absolutely, yes. We do not have an exact parallel with the employer, but we have something pretty close… In the order of 2 million self-employed people fill in a tax return. There is no reason why you could not use the tax return as, effectively, a default into pension saving … Early on in the tax-return process, when you are still feeling confident… you are asked, “If you were to put money in a pension, where would you put it?” You nominate a pension. At the end of the calculation, HMRC says, “We have done your tax calculation. We have included in this a 4% or 5% contribution. You do not have to do this. You can opt out.”
Sir Steve added that the Government “are just being too timid about it” following the attempt to raise class 4 NICs at the Spring Budget 2017.140 Michael Johnson (Centre for Policy Studies) suggested that the difference between class 1 and class 4 NICs could be used to create an automatic enrolment system for the self-employed, but similarly acknowledged that the Government may be reluctant to be seen to raise NICs for the self-employed.141
130.The Government’s response to the 2017 Automatic Enrolment Review was criticised for concluding that “there is no single or simple and straightforward mechanism to bring self-employed people into workplace pension saving” and only promising to test unspecified “targeted interventions” without a timescale.142 Guy Opperman told the Committee “we have not ducked the opportunity… there is no one solution to the individual self-employed.” He also suggested that developments in fintech would help provide a solution. When asked whether the Treasury was considering using self-assessment or NICs to bring the self-employed into automatic enrolment, John Glen said “that is not something that we are minded to do.”143
131.There is an urgent need to bring the self-employed into the automatic enrolment system, but it is not clear that the Government has a clear strategy or timetable for doing so. According to the evidence received by this inquiry, the most straightforward solution would make use of self-assessment and national insurance contributions. The Treasury should keep an open mind towards doing so, and the possibility should be analysed as part of the next automatic enrolment review.
The state pension triple lock
132.The “triple lock”, which raises the state pension annually by the highest of either CPI price inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5 per cent, was implemented in 2012 and has remained in place since. Earnings growth has frequently been below either 2.5 per cent or inflation and, as a result, the state pension has increased sharply relative to earnings.144 In the long term, the triple lock would be expected to exert what the Institute for Fiscal Studies has called a “ratchet effect” on the state pension: because it will always rise with the fastest of earnings, inflation or 2.5 per cent, it will grow faster than each of them.145
133.The Committee received mixed evidence on the role of the (new) state pension and triple lock. Following the implementation of pension freedoms, the state pension is seen as having an important role in providing a backstop minimum income for retirees. It is also noted that the triple lock had reduced pensioner poverty and that the UK state pension remains low by the standards of OECD economies. However, the triple lock is not seen as sustainable in the long run.146
134.Steve Webb told the Committee that he thought that the state pension was now roughly at the appropriate level, relative to earnings:
The state pension is £8,300 a year. The auto-enrolment threshold is £10,000 for a reason. There are two sorts of folk. For the folk who always earn £8,000 or £9,000 a year for their entire lives, a state pension of £8,000 or £9,000 is exactly what is right and appropriate. […] The public sector is on the hook for bucket loads of longevity risk across health, social care, public services and pensions.147
135.Nonetheless, according to the Automatic Enrolment Review, moving from the triple lock to an earnings-uprated state pension would increase the number of under-savers by 1.8 million people.148
136.The Government has committed to maintaining the triple lock on the state pension to the end of this Parliament. If it is maintained in the longer term, the state pension will rise relative to earnings indefinitely. This is clearly unsustainable. However, according to the Government’s analysis, replacing it with earnings-uprating could result in a large rise in the number of under-savers. The next auto-enrolment review should explore the options for making up with private savings the shortfall that could result if the triple lock were abandoned in future.
105 Office for National Statistics, Occupational Pension Schemes Survey: UK, 2016, 28 September 2017
106 See Chapter 1 of this report
107 CityAM, It’s official: The UK’s state pension is the least generous in the OECD, 6 December 2017
108 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q232–235
109 Based on target replacement rates of gross pre-retirement income by gross pensions income ranging from around 80% for the lowest earners and 50% for the highest earners.
110 Department for Work and Pensions, Automatic enrolment review 2017: analytical report, 17 December 2017
111 Ibid
112 Oral evidence taken on 14 November 2017, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q3
113 Oral evidence taken on 8 May 2018, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q296
114 Department for Work and Pensions, Automatic Enrolment Review 2017: Maintaining the Momentum, 17 December 2017
115 Oral evidence taken on 8 May 2018, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q296
116 Including employee and employer contributions, the rate previously rose from began at 2 per cent, rose to 5 per cent in April 2018, and will rise to 8 per cent from April 2019 (The Pensions Regulator, Increase of automatic enrolment contributions, accessed 3 July 2017)
117 Oral evidence taken on 14 November 2017, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q9–10
118 Evidence submitted by the Economic Secretary to the Treasury (HHF0052) and HMRC, Estimated Costs of Tax Reliefs, 23 January 2018
119 House of Commons Library, Reform of pension tax relief, Briefing paper Number CBP-07505, 25 October 2017 and HM Treasury, Strengthening the incentive to save: consultation on pensions tax relief, 8 July 2015
120 See Chapter 4 of this report
121 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q222
122 Survey of Personal Incomes 2015–16, Table 3.8 and Survey of Personal Incomes 2010–11, Table 3.8
123 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q180, Q202
124 Oral evidence taken on 14 November 2017, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q4, Q9
125 These included Torsten Bell (“We all can agree that pension tax relief is an expensive, inefficient way of subsidising savings. The most important thing that can be done right now is to make a success of auto-enrolment and that not going wrong.”) and Ashwin Kumar (“we have not necessarily advocated specifically the abolition of tax relief”). Ibid.
126 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q222
127 Evidence submitted by Hargreaves Lansdowne (HHF0015), Evidence submitted by UK Finance (HHF0028) and Evidence submitted by Zurich Insurance (HHF0031)
128 Oral evidence taken on 14 November 2017, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q4, Q9
129 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q222
130 Oral evidence taken on 8 May 2018, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q311
131 In evidence to this Committee, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury described it as “a complement to the pension system”. Ibid, Q318
132 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q224
133 Ibid
134 Evidence submitted by UK Finance (HHF0028)
137 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q224
138 Ibid, Q214
139 Oral evidence taken on 14 November 2017, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q69–70
140 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q227–228
141 Oral evidence taken on 14 November 2017, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q69
142 Department for Work and Pensions, Automatic Enrolment Review 2017: Maintaining the Momentum, 17 December 2017 and Financial Times, UK risks lost pension generation as critics attack reforms, 17 December 2017
143 Oral evidence taken on 8 May 2018, Household finances: income, saving & debt, HC 600, Q296
144 House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, Intergenerational fairness, Third Report of Session 2016–17, 28 February 2018
145 Institute for Fiscal Studies, Andrew Hood: ‘A ‘double lock’ on the state pension would still be a bad idea’, 27 April 2017
146 See Evidence submitted by the Open University PUFin (HHF0030), Evidence submitted by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (HHF0014) and Evidence submitted by the International Longevity Centre UK (HHF0037)
147 Oral evidence taken on 13 March 2018, Household finances: income, savings and debt, HC 565, Q227–228 Q235, Q239
148 Department for Work and Pensions, Automatic enrolment review 2017: analytical report, 17 December 2017
Published: 26 July 2018