Queen’s Speech Promises Pension Reform

Queen Elizabeth II’s Queen’s Speech promised a reform for the British pension system. The reform focuses on how to keep pension collectors from being victims of large-scale scams, and other protective measures for people of pension-collecting age.

Mirror has more about the speech:

Savers into workplace pensions will get more protection under measures announced in the Queen’s Speech.

The Government has tightened the rules for master trusts – the pension schemes holding millions of pounds from workplace pension schemes.

Nine million Brits are expected to be saving into a pension for the first time or saving significantly more by 2017.

But MPs had raised concerns that master trusts were not carefully vetted , and that workers’ hard-earned savings could be at risk if one went bust.

The Work and Pensions Committee warned: “Should one of these trusts collapse, there is a very real danger that ordinary scheme members could lose retirement savings.”

[…]

The Government is introducing tighter rules to make sure only the most responsible master trusts win approval.

It is capping early exit charges, meaning savers old enough to cash in can do so without getting stung by high fees. At present, nearly 700,000 savers could be forced to pay a fee.

And it is creating a new pensions guidance service designed to help savers make decisions about how to use their pension.

Critics of the new measures say that despite the proposed guidance service, British citizens who are saving for pensions may not have enough information to make fully informed decisions.