Rachel Reeves Credit: HM Treasury Flickr
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to launch a commission to lead the long-awaited review into pensions adequacy during her Mansion House speech on 15 July, reports say.
In an article published today (4 July), the Financial Times reported that Reeves' speech would herald the beginning of the second part of the government's pensions review and a commission looking at auto-enrolment (AE) rates alongside the state pension and retirement savings of the self-employed.
The review was first announced by Reeves last July and was supposed to launch by the end of last year.
Last month, pensions minister Torsten Bell said the government was planning to launch the second phase of the Pensions Review "shortly" – noting it would focus on the "adequacy of retirement incomes and the fairness of the system that has persistent inequalities within it".
At the time, Bell said: "It is 20 years since the Turner Commission, and it is time to build on that legacy by completing the job."
He continued: "I am alive to the challenges of doing so, but we should take confidence from the policy challenges we have overcome before; the challenges of the 1990s, where the threat of employer insolvencies risked leaving employees with empty promises, and of the 2000s, where millions were saving nothing for their retirement at all."
He said: "Governments are like people in one important way: they can easily put off thinking about pensions until it is too late. We must not do that, and we are not doing that. I know the task is to finish the job – to celebrate that people are saving something, but recognise our job must go beyond that: to build a pension system."
The speculation comes as the Institute for Fiscal Studies published the final recommendations from its own pensions review on Wednesday (2 July) – urging the government to take "decisive action" to address the challenges facing the UK pensions system and the risks of inadequate retirement outcomes for future generations.
The IFS said the UK pensions system had seen "major improvements" in recent decades but noted that "serious" problems remain for the next generation of pensioners, as they would be less likely to have defined benefit pension savings and would not benefit from the levels of home ownership previous generations of retirees have seen.
The IFS recommendations included that pension participation should be extended by providing employer contributions to almost all employees, even to those who do not contribute themselves, and an increase in default minimum pension contributions, particularly for middle and higher-earners.
