Pension disaster

Two months after the 1997 election, Gordon Brown set the tone of his chancellorship with a vast pension raid in what became known as the Robert Maxwell memorial budget.

It heralded an era of stealth taxes and fiscal irresponsibility which further undermined private sector pensions and those in the know diverted their retirement savings elsewhere.

Four years ago at his party conference, George Osborne promised to “reverse the effects of Gordon Brown’s disastrous pensions’ raid and get the country saving again”. 

Sadly, that was one of the pledges abandoned when he reached No 11 because he could not bring himself to reverse a tax grab worth £8 billion a year to the Treasury.

Meanwhile, our shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, promises to ­impose a limit on the lump sum that savers can take tax-free from their pension pots to £36,000.

These schemes, once the envy of the world, are now a lost cause and an entirely new idea is needed with in-built protection from sharks in the finance industry and the Treasury.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews