In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, the Shadow Chancellor Geroge Osbourne has proposed that stamp duty on shares should be scrapped as part of a package to help boost pensions and increase competitiveness.
Sounds great to me. The state of pensions in this country these days is terrible. This has then been helped on by the inequity of Gordon Brown's tax credit system which discourages saving as a fundamental principle.
The result is that those with pensions have concerns about their valus, whilst many simple don't bother as saving money means they lose tax credits. If the system remains like that for much longer we won't have a pensions crisis, we'll have a pensions catastrophe.
1 comment:
The pension system needs wholesale change. It needs simplification. We need to encourage people to save, whilst this proposal is a step in the right direction, it needs to go further. If people don't understand the pesion system, and there is sufficient complexity for politicians to tinker at the edges (thus reducing stability), then people will not save.
I have just written an article about this - I didn't realise how timely it would be!
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