CITY AND SUBURBAN
If Norman can't slay the Serps, Nigel must give us the Pips
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
We have scotched the Serps, not killed it. The Macbeths had the same trouble, and look what happened to them. Norman Fowler, take warnings. Serps is the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme, and only this spring Mr Fowler was preparing to hack it down. In its stead there would be the state's basic pension, occupational pension schemes, and person- al pension plans. He shocked those who have to be shocked in the ordinary way of politics. He shocked the CBI, or that part of it which is run by personnel directors who believe in the status quo. He shocked the life insurance offices, who share that belief, and, offered a limitless opportunity, preferred a stable and quiet life of their• own. Now the signs multiply, most plainly from Blackpool this week, that Mr Fowler is preparing his retreat — to a system which does not scrap Serps, but in some ways amends it, and leaves more scope for personal provision. . . . His successors will rue it. They are likely to see, what we can only guess, that Serps is an actuarial Concorde which should have been shot down on the drawing-board. What we can see now is that the provision of pensions linked to earnings is simply no business of government's. We rightly expect a basic provision against the basic necessities of old age. If we want more, and our earnings allow us to provide for more, we can. Why should the state force that choice upon us? This week the proponents of choice in pensions — Philip Chappell and Lord Vin- son, whose 'Personal and Portable Pen- sions for All' set the wheel rolling — suggest a new form of choice: Pips: Personal Investment Pools. Give personal savings (they say) the same tax privileges as the pension funds enjoy. Everyone should be allowed to put money into his own pool, free of tax when it goes in and for as long as it stays in, subject to income tax when it comes out. Mr Chappell would have liked to have started from the other end — to have gone for fiscal neutrality, freedom of choice in savings, and direct personal ownership by taking away the tax pri- vileges of the pension funds. The pensions lobby barred that door to Nigel Lawson, as we saw in his last Budget. Let us hope for some Pips in his next.
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