Monday 18 January 2016

Workplace Pensions TV Advertising

We keep getting bombarded with TV ads for the workplace pension, goodness knows how much money the government is spending on the ads. The thrust is "don't ignore the workplace pension it's a legal obligation". A legal pain in the backside for entrepreneurs, small businesses and people trying to give work to carers, cleaners gardeners no doubt.

Clearly we woudn't be seeing all these ads unless people were ignoring the workplace pension, and why would they do that? Because it's too onerous maybe. I've said before that a country is like a large complex corporation, but instead of people who've studied business we get politicians who've studied politics, they know how to work the system, but not the country.

The  Tories worked the problem out years ago. Baby boom after the war, National Insurance not ring fenced or invested for the future, but a system where the young tax payers pay the pensions of their elders (crooked and stupid in itself), so when the pendulum swings, not enough money, obviously. So what did they do? rhetorical question, they got us all to invest in personal pensions and conned us into opting out of SERPS (The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme) by offering incentives to help grow the new personal pensions we were paying into.

Enter New Labour and new chancellor Gordon Brown, he who must have spent more of our money than any other peacetime politician in UK history. During the 'honeymoon period' when nobody wants to see any faults he destroys our personal pensions because he's promised not to raise taxes but he wants to get more money out of us somehow. Billions have been wiped off our pensions, but his will be fine you can rest assured, government see.

So now we're back to square one, or worse really and so the Tories introduce the Workplace Pension, but as usual they get the detail all wrong, go too far and no one wants to know and so they're wasting more money on advertising. That's without all the bureaucratic waste governments create each time they change the system. The whole lot of 'em need to go.

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