Pension tax relief isn't working well - how can we improve it?

For incentives to work, they must be understood – and that is not the case, says Baroness Ros Altmann

clock • 3 min read

Tax relief in its current form just isn’t working. It’s meant to offer an incentive to get us to save for retirement, but it is so complex that most people don’t understand it. Without knowing how it works and how valuable it is, it clearly cannot provide much incentive for increasing contributions.

This is a real shame, because the pension tax relief system costs the government more than £40bn a year when including national insurance relief - but these huge sums of money are not being well ta...

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