Opinion: ​And the rich are set to get richer!

For me, that was vital because I had to retire from my last career as a driving instructor on health grounds just before the Covid lockdown. My pension, along with the allowance I receive as a councillor, certainly kept the proverbial wolf from the door as I would have had no other source of funding during the pandemic. It was a lifeline.

Thanks to the Conservative budget last week, many people on extremely high incomes will now be able expand their pension pots to pass on hundreds of thousands of pounds more to their loved ones, tax free, when they die. This is because the chancellor, in his infinite wisdom abolished the pensions lifetime allowance. This is the limit on how much people can build up in their pots.

Previously, anything over £1.07m was subject to a tax charge of up to 55%. Instead of increasing the allowance, as had been expected, the chancellor scrapped it altogether. The argument for it is to encourage skilled people such as surgeons etc. to continue working. That’s perhaps not a bad idea given we are all struggling to even get through to a GP, let alone see one. But at what cost to the rest of us. Think about that please.

Call me old fashioned but, to me, and you I hope, the purpose of pensions savings should be to fund retirement incomes not to escape paying tax that we desperately need to service our vital services and infrastructure. This was a budget for the wealthy who maybe licked their lips when ‘Liz’ and ‘Kwasi’ were wrecking the economy last September, again to serve the super-rich. Is that fair when most of us are struggling to pay our utility bills and I and my fellow food bank volunteers are seeing increasing numbers of pensioners, who have already saved for their old age having to rely on us to make ends meet?

Personally, I find it obscene that working people who don’t even know what a million-pound pension will look like as the average pension pot in the UK is estimated to be between £70K and £107K. In addition, wages are lower now in real terms than they were 13 years ago and likely to fall further this year. Real weekly wages are expected to remain below 2008 levels until 2026 so how do ordinary working people top up their pensions to anything like realistic levels?

There was a time when we were told by an earlier Conservative government that, during austerity, we were ‘all in this together’.

Now, there is no pretence, the top 1% of earners avoid paying Inheritance Tax when passing on the savings in their pension pots tax free. That is surely not what pensions were designed to do – for most of us anyway. The UK economy continues to struggle but at least the super-rich are being helped in the budget, I’m sure you will be pleased to know. We must surely recognise this cannot go on and, locally and nationally, it really is time for change to help the majority, not just the few.