Government interventions to support retirement incomes

Book excerpt: Government measures to reduce the liability of the state for supporting people in their retirement are being managed separately, without adequate consideration of their combined impact on the overall objective of increasing retirement incomes. There is no overarching programme or single accountability for encouraging people to save for retirement. The Treasury leads on overall savings strategy, and DWP on workplace saving but, without a whole system view there is a risk that individual, but co-dependent interventions may not be effective in increasing saving for retirement. Spending on the state pension and pensioner benefits increased from 5.5 per cent of GDP in 1990 to 6.9 per cent in 2011-12, in part because of the growing pensioner population, but also because of increased spending per capita on pensioner benefits. The Government expects to reduce the potential long-term spending liability by increasing the future state pension age, introducing automatic enrolment into workplace pensions and changing the state pension. However the existing initiatives to manage this problem face challenges. Government does not have a formal published strategy to influence employers. The success of encouraging saving for retirement through automatic enrolment into a pension also depends on the responses of individuals, pension providers and employers - in particular on the proportion of employees who remain with the schemes. The value of the UK state pension, as a proportion of pre-retirement earnings, has historically been low compared to other developed countries, and projections for future spending on state pensions and pensioner benefits may prove too optimistic