Take a stake
THAT business now has to accommodate the government's ideas about stakeholder pensions. Nebulous in the first place, those ideas keep changing. The sixth in a series of consultation papers is promised for next month, which seems a bit late, seeing that the legislation has already made its way through the House of Com- mons. This paper will deal with what the jargon calls parallel pensions: can you be in a stakeholder pension scheme and in another scheme, too? The National Asso- ciation of Pension Funds (which, for all that its high-sounding name might imply, is a lobbying organisation for those who make a living out of running them) warns that conventional schemes based on final salaries are being undermined. Employers may find themselves tempted, the NAPF says, to close their schemes to new entrants. How many of these newcomers will be with the same employer when they reach retirement age? How many of these employers will go out of business? Who will keep their funds going, as managers or as trustees, and what will pay for all this, other than the funds themselves? What chance of a monthly cheque for £19? The most obvious way to be a stake- holder is to be an owner, and the best kind of stakeholder pension is one that you own. There is still time for ministers to change their ideas again and say so.
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