“As the UK population continues to benefit from increased life expectancy, preparing the economy for the decade ahead must include further strengthening our society’s preparations for longer retirements, including developing a sustainable solution to the social care crisis.
“Over the last decade, auto-enrolment has meant millions of additional employees are now saving into workplace pensions. The challenge for the coming decade is to make sure they are saving enough for the quality of life in retirement they aspire to. The Government now needs to advance previous proposals to increase minimum contributions and find solutions to ‘level up’ pension provision for the self-employed who are currently excluded from auto-enrolment.
“In addition, industry and Government needs to work together to truly engage people with their retirement savings and where their money is invested through initiatives such as pension dashboards which will show people all of their pensions together online. Many people will need to save more than the auto-enrolment minimum to meet their retirement aspirations and we need to support them understand this.
“Incentivise greater savings should benefit the economy. Tax reliefs for pensions play an important role here and may need reformed to make them simpler. While there is also merit in giving a greater share of reliefs to lower rather than higher earners, it’s vital that any new approach still means it remains in everyone’s financial interests to save in pensions.
“A priority for the coming decade is arriving at a fair and sustainable system, with cross party support, for funding social care. People need to know what the Government will pay and what they will be asked to fund themselves, based on their wealth. They then need incentivised to plan ahead.
“With growing controversy over the continued increases to state pension age, and to mirror the flexibility already available within private pensions, we’d also call on the Government to explore in the coming years how to offer people the choice of taking their state pension earlier than the ‘standard’ age at a reduced level to make it financially fair.”
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