Tom Selby: Does secondary annuities U-turn signal new era of pensions stability?

Time to create sensible pensions policy

clock • 3 min read

Having scrapped the secondary annuities reforms, says Tom Selby, Chancellor Phillip Hammond must now go further and remove pensions tax relief from the political front line

George Osborne made a number of mistakes while in charge at the Treasury. The former Chancellor - supposedly responsible for strategy in the Conservative Party electoral machine - was infamously forced into embarrassing U-turns on tax measures aimed at older people (the ‘granny tax'), Greggs customers (the ‘pasty tax') and caravan-owners (the, well, ‘caravan tax'). But his fatal error was making an enemy of Theresa May, the woman anointed Prime Minister following David Cameron's hasty post-referendum departure. One of her first acts as PM was to sack the man who had been at the centre of...

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