The chancellor’s claim to have axed the need for a pension annuity is unimpressive – and familiar
KEY POINTS
- Need to buy an annuity was really abolished in 2006.
- Change to state pension means few pensioners will be claiming pension credit.
- Government can therefore afford to allow all to draw down on their pension funds.
- But it will mean pensioners paying far more in tax funding personal allowance increase.
Readers of a certain age will remember the cliffhanger at the end of the 1986 season of Dallas where Pamela Ewing opened the cubicle door to find her husband Bobby having a shower.
The reason it was a cliffhanger was that the audience had seen Bobby being murdered a year earlier and had followed the Ewing family through the aftermath of his death. The explanation given at the start of the following season was that the previous year’s...