Rumours are swirling of Chancellor Reeves eyeing up a raid on pension tax reliefs, aiming to tighten her grip on hardworking Britons’ wallets. Now the Institute for Fiscal Studies has called for Reeves to reduce the amount that pensioners can withdraw from their pension pots tax-free. As it stands, savers can take out 25% of their pension tax-free up to £268,275, though the tax-happy think tank says this should be reduced to £100,000. Hitting 1 in 5 hard-working retirees’ wallets…

Tax lawyer and senior Labour activist Dan Neidle slammed the idea, pointing out the tax-free lump sum has been a cornerstone of the “deal” that workers have been promised when putting their hard-earned cash into their pensions. It would be yet another policy proving high-tax Labour view the elderly vote as less important. Reeves would be wise to ignore the idea, branded “unethical” by Cut My Tax. Changing the rules half-way through the game isn’t a good look for a party that claims to be one of “integrity”…

New public expenditure figures from the Treasury show that the cost of gold-plated public sector pensions enjoyed by 80% of public sector workers has more than doubled. Taxpayers have forked out £10 billion to prop up the system in the past 5 years…

Luxurious defined benefit pensions paid to the likes of civil servants and MPs have steadily risen from a total of £40 billion in 2019 to £49.6 billion this year, while the proportion of contributions received has fallen – meaning the taxpayer has to cover the rest. The net cost has more than doubled from last year from £1 billion to £2.4 billion. Private sector employees could but dream…

The Taxpayers’ Alliance have revealed that in 2022-23, twenty leading civil servants had an average pension pot of £1.1 million, a combined amount worth £21 million. Currently, the lifetime pension pot allowance is set at £1,073,100…

Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office had the largest accrued pension of £102,500, despite the fact he’s been the one to oversee the surge in illegal channel crossings. Sir Philip Barton, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, had a pension pot worth over £2,016,000. The retirement pension for these 20 civil servants is expected to average £65,921, double the amount the average gross UK private sector salary in 2023. Nice work if you can get it…

Given Labour now claims they are the party of “sound money“, you’d at least hope their frontbenchers understand how a pension works. It turns out that’s too much to expect for the Shadow Minister for the “Future of Work”. Here’s Justin Madders asking the government how many primary school children receive Pension Credit…

Maybe Madders has some radical ideas for the “future of work“. A reminder: each Written Parliamentary Question costs the taxpayer £140…