Jeff Prestridge

We no longer have a pensions system, just a mess caused by the Treasury

Back in the 1980s, when I was embarking on a lifetime of sweat, toil and tears in order to bring home the bacon, I lived in a pensions desert. I couldn’t see, feel or feed one (a pension, that is) for miles around.

During this decade, against a backdrop of privatisations, a rampant Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher), Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Madonna’s virgins, I was privileged to work for four employers. A major chartered accountancy practice, a big and little publisher and a now defunct building society. Not one offered me the opportunity to save into a company pension.

At the time I wasn’t bothered – life was for living, a house (well, ok, a flat to be precise) had to be bought and the starting of a family was very much at the forefront of our minds (our being myself and wife Susan). I needed every penny my employers reluctantly paid me.

But as time has passed and my ginger locks have turned grey, it has increasingly irked me that I was not encouraged to start building a pension pot early on in life. How much better positioned I would now be to face my eventual drift into semi-retirement and obscurity, walking the Lakeland fells and left to wander lonely as a cloud.

Of course, today, my four early employers would not get away with sitting me in a pension desert because of the new auto-enrolment rules introduced in late 2012. They would be required to put a plan in place, provided my pay matched the minimum under the auto-enrolment guidelines (debatable).

Sadly, auto-enrolment is about the only good thing that has happened to private pensions in my working lifetime. With the honourable exception of the setting up of the Pension Protection Fund in 2005 to protect employees’ pensions in the event of their employer going bust, everything else has been for the worse.

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