Successive Chancellors have viewed our pension savings as a giant cash cow, to be milked whenever the nation’s coffers run dry. Now it’s Rishi Sunak’s turn.
Those with longer memories will recall former Chancellor Gordon Brown’s stealth pensions tax raid, which he launched back in 1997.
Brown scrapped tax relief on pension firms’ dividends, effectively destroying the country’s gold-plated final salary schemes.
The move saved the Treasury almost £7 billion a year – and our total losses have probably topped £200 billion by now.
Sunak has been taking a leaf out of Brown’s book.
He’s not the first and won’t be the last. Our pension pots are a sitting target in any tax raid.
The pensions lifetime allowance stood at a thumping £1.8 million, in the 2011/12 tax year.
Only the very wealthy with huge pension pots paid it then. Successive chancellors slashed it back to a low of just £1 million and suddenly, you didn’t have to be that rich to pay it.
Last March, Sunak froze it at £1,073,100 for five years, in a move that will drag more savers into the net every year.
Anyone who…
