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Remove tax incentives for pensions – then what?

As the UK government consults on pensions tax incentives, what could happen if “Pensions ISAs” replaced the current system?  It would be very helpful if such an experiment has been tried somewhere else – and happily, New Zealand provides.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the New Zealand government radically reformed its economic and social institutions. Markets were deregulated and privatised; the financial sector was liberalised. The tax system became flatter and simpler, and tax neutrality – including that no savings vehicle should be taxed differently than any other – was seen as A Good Thing.

Following this philosophy, between 1987 and 1990, the tax framework for pension schemes changed from

to

This would be similar to switching the tax framework for UK pensions to that for Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) –  the UK government is currently consulting on whether to do this.

So what happened when New Zealand switched?  There’s no doubt that pension schemes suffered.  Just after the reforms, 22.5 per cent of the workforce were in an employer-sponsored scheme but only 14.6 per cent were by the end of 2001.  However, contemporary accounts offer reasons other than purely the tax change for the decline in employer-sponsored pensions (2):

Many of these trends happened elsewhere.  They may have had more impact on New Zealand workplace schemes because New Zealand has relatively few large employers. And while personal pensions were available in the UK, there was then no such option in New Zealand.

So was the tax reform in New Zealand a bad thing? Long-term, the answer seems to be no:

Added to that, we are in a different world now.

Would pensions ISAs be bad policy for the UK? New Zealand experience suggests that the sky wouldn’t fall in. However, the UK has always had more private pension provision than New Zealand, with higher tax incentives and a more vocal political constituency.  A change would be even more of a shock in the UK than it was in New Zealand. Is such a shake-up needed? Reducing the cost of tax incentives, and changing the distribution of who benefits, could be achieved simply by revising the current system.

(1) Michael Littlewood (1998) How to Create a Competitive Market in Pensions: The International Lessons, IEA Health and Welfare Unit

(2) ASFONZ (now Workplace Savings) (2003) Submission to the Periodic Reporting Group. PDF

(3) Peter Harris (2012) New Zealand’s Retirement Income Framework: trends, continuity, change. A background paper prepared for the 2013 review of retirement income policy. Commission for Financial Capability. PDF

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