News

You may have already noticed that our site has had a revamp! While the information on the website had been kept up to date, the look and feel had become quite dated. We’ve given the website a makeover and you should now see a brighter and more modern site, but still with easily accessible information. You should be able to find your way around the site, but there are a couple of new features we’d like to point out to you:

• Quick Links: a link to our most commonly used member forms is now available straight from the homepage. We hope you find this useful.
• Latest News: our news section has a new look, and you can see the latest news direct from the homepage and also from many of the other pages (see the links on the right hand side).
• Coats news: many of our pages now feature a link (on the right hand side) to the news section of the main coats.com website.

In the future, we intend to give members access to their pension records direct from the Plan website. We are working with our software suppliers to make this happen, once we are sure that the security and other issues surrounding this are in place. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy using our new look site.

We are pleased to announce that our Explanatory Booklet for our active members has been completely revised and updated.

We have reduced the length of the booklet so that it is more of a summary and easier for members and potential members to read. We also wanted to make the booklet an interactive, web-based document to save on printing. The booklet contains clickable links to more information where appropriate. By cutting out the printing and associated costs, we have significantly reduced the cost of updating the booklet and, more importantly, we can update it as and when legislation or Plan changes occur. It can still be printed if you require.

We hope you like the new look and feel of the booklet – you can view it by clicking here.

Have you had a phone call about “releasing your pension early”? Has anyone offered to “unlock your frozen pension”? Unscrupulous companies claim that they can help you cash in your pension early. If you agree to this, you could face a tax bill of more than half your pension savings.

The Pensions Regulator has provided guidance to legitimate schemes receiving transfer requests. They have also produced a leaflet to help you identify these scams for yourself. You can view this from The Pensions Regulator’s website or by clicking here.

The Pensions Office is dedicated to following best practice and we will be examining transfer requests carefully to spot these scam pension schemes and protect our members’ interests.

George Osborne’s fourth Budget, announced on 19 March, introduced few surprises. While it isn’t our intention to cover the whole Budget here, we thought we’d highlight the main points that may affect our members.

Income tax free allowance uplifts have been brought forward so that they are ahead of the original schedule and will rise to £9440 at 6/4/2013 and £10,000 at 6/4/2014. While this may be good news for those in employment, it is perhaps less pleasant for pensioners over 65 who either have age related allowances or have been denied them (dubbed the “granny tax”). These higher allowances now only apply to those who are already in receipt of them (i.e. a pensioner reaching 65 next tax year will not get the age related allowances), and they have been frozen as it is ultimately intended that allowances will be equalised.

Those in the higher tax bracket will benefit less, or not at all, and a few will pay more, as a result of the change to the allowance as the 40% bracket continues to shrink, those in the additional tax bracket do not benefit at all, but will see the tax they pay on earnings in this bracket reduce from 50% to 45%.

The commencement date for the introduction of the single flat-rate pension of (presently) £144 a week has been brought forward to 2016 – meaning that “contracting-out” of the Additional State Pension will also cease earlier than anticipated. Debate continues over this issue as it becomes clearer who will win and who will lose when this takes off. One to watch. For now Basic State Pension increases by 2.5%, and Additional State Pension increases by 2.2%.

For more information on the Budget, please click here.

The latest edition of Pensions News is being issued to all our members and should be delivered in early December. Please click here to read Pensions News 29.

If you are still receiving your copy of Pensions News by post, please remember that you can save the Plan money by choosing to receive future editions of Pensions News and other general correspondence electronically.  If you have already given us your email address, thank you.