News

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.

Given the problems experienced by Royal Bank of Scotland customers over the past few days, we have been concerned that our Pensioner Payroll would be affected.  The Pensions Office has been assured by RBS that the problems currently being experienced relate to old payments.  New payments are back to normal and should be processed on time.  There should be, therefore, no change to the Pensioner Pay Date this month.

Please note that as we are moving office over the weekend, our telephone system will be down on Friday afternoon.   You will therefore be unable to contact anyone in the Pensions Office on Friday afternoon, but you can contact us at our new office from Monday 2 July.

Our new address is Cornerstone, 107 West Regent Street, Glasgow  G2 2BA.  Our telephone numbers remain the same.

The latest edition of Pensions News is being issued to all our members and should be delivered in early May. Please click here to read Pensions News 28. The Annual Funding Statement is enclosed with Pensions News.

If you are still receiving your copy of Pensions News by post, please remember that you can save the Plan money – and enter our competition – 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.