OPINIONS

1. Poor people only earn enough money to lead a subsistence life when they are working, they can't be expected to further degrade their present life by investing in a pension scheme for a retirement they don't expect to reach and hope not to. It must not be left to those in this position to make their own pension arrangements, they are almost certain to make insufficient provision.
2. People must be able to work for as long as they want and are able to.
3. They must be able to reduce their working hours and increase the length of their holidays as they get older, they shouldn't have to give up work altogether.
4. They must be able to change the type of work they do as they get older.
5. A substantial proportion of the elderly yet fit could be employed looking after the old and infirm.
6. The public sector ought to be able to provide decent pension schemes, it has the advantage of scale over commercial pension providers. Everybody who works in the commercial financial services industry thinks they should be paid enough to own a detached five bedroom house and swish Mercedes or BMW, they are all blood-sucking parasites, if the public sector can't compete with them perhaps the Mafia ought to be called in to have a go.
7. Judging by the problems of the Equitable Life Assurance Society the basic principles on which pension schemes should work haven't been defined by the regulating authorities yet.
8. All guarantees given by pension providing companies should be declared void, they cannot be met without cheating people who weren't given the guarantees, they were a confidence trick, ie. fraudulent.
9. Equitable Life. What was probably the best arrangement in unsatisfactory circumstances (for allocating funds to members at the time of retirement) has been completely sabotaged by the legal system of this country at immense cost to a great many people. This is in order to give modern Shylocks, who insist they receive the pound of flesh promised them (ie. guaranteed annuity rates) although their investments haven't performed well enough to fund them and although other people's investments will have to be plundered to meet the shortfall (and even though these other people had no way of knowing that their investments were threatened in this way), what they were guaranteed. Three different levels of the legal system, High Court, Appeal Court, House of Lords gave three different rulings on the case. How can one have faith in the correctness of any of them? It seems that one is as likely to get the right answer to a legal question by throwing a dice as by going to court; time and time again one hears of court rulings being overthrown by higher courts and the verdicts of all the British courts being overthrown by the European Court. It's a great, ie. very remunerative, game for the lawyers. It isn't law that people want, it is justice. I am almost certain that the people who opted for the guaranteed annuity rate benefit paid the same contributions as those who didn't, (while it was available everybody told of it probably opted to take it). People paying the same contributions should get the same benefits. Since the guaranteed annuity rates couldn't be met without serious damage to those without them and without risking the solvency of the Society (despite the absence of any disaster such as a war or depression) the only just solution was to declare the guarantee null and void, the guarantees were a con., a gamble or a fraud. This wasn't the solution adopted. If it had been, some people who have been drawing their pension for some time may have benefited more than they should have done and it may not have been possible to sort everything out perfectly fairly but the result of this hypothetical ruling would almost certainly have been far less damaging than what has actually come to pass. It shouldn't be possible for pension providers to go bankrupt or to get into the difficulties Equitable Life has. It is clear that both the management of Equitable Life (and many other pension providers probably) and the regulating authorities have been grossly incompetent. Other pension providers sold policies with the guaranteed annuity rate option but they seem to have stopped doing so earlier than Equitable Life hence they haven't got into such a mess. Another reason for this is that Equitable Life didn't put any of the money invested with it into reserve or contingency funds whereas the other providers did. These contingency funds are being used by the other providers to honour the guarantees but some of the money in them has probably been taken from those without the guaranteed annuity rate option, ie those without the option are subsidising those with it but they are unlikely to be aware of that. They are probably being cheated just as the Equitable Life policy holders have been.