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This may not be a surprise, but it's stacking up a massive problem for society for the future. People are failing to make provision for their old age, which means they will fall back on the State to bail them out, and at the same time with people living longer there will be more retired people and fewer working people to support them. <br/><br/>The most sensible thing would have been to have left SERPS in place instead of sweeping away a system that did not allow either individuals or employers to bury their heads in the sand over how to provide an income in retirement, in favour of a free market alternative which resulted in the mis-selling of personal pensions. <br/><br/>Since the early 1990s successive Governments have shied away from the obvious answer, and instead of reinstating a meaningful earnings-related pension we have had Stakeholder schemes and S2P and now NEST. The flaw in all of the above is the lack of compulsion. If you let people opt out of contributing to something, a lot of them will - preferring to purchase an enormous TV set or subscribe to SKY, rather than planning for their own futures. <br/><br/>As employers, the best we can do is communicate the advantages of pension savings clearly to all staff, and hope that inertia does the rest.
This should not come as any surprise. Many people who paid in over many years to certain private pension schemes suddenly discovered that they were not worth the paper they were printed on, with many being worth less than the amount that had been paid in....I wonder why people have decided to opt out?!