this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
53 points (98.2% liked)

United Kingdom

4134 readers
106 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (9 children)
[–] Piatro 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

If you're British and employed your employer is legally required to provide a private pension I believe. You also get a state pension if you've been paying national insurance (most people will get this taken out of pay cheques before you ever see the money, same as income tax). Some employers offer "matching contributions" up to a certain amount. For example if you decide you want to send £100 per month into your private pension, your employer will also do the same, so your pension gets £200. These contributions are tax free so it's a tax-efficient way to save money when compared to privately investing where you'd have to invest from your income, which has already been taxed and then potentially have to pay capital gains tax on profits.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Over 1 million people are on zero hour contracts (1 in 33 UK working age people), which does not mandate employers to auto-enroll. Another 4 million are self-employed, and the majority of them are not saving towards retirement.

That means a potential of 3 million of working age zero and self-employed have nothing saved, a further 2 million from that same pool will likely have less than recommended amount saved.

In the company employed pool, 9% have opted out of the enrollment, so that's 2.5 million opted out.

In total, about 20% of working age people are not actively saving into pensions (although may save elsewhere). A potential bombshell if that many people become officially destitute in a relatively short space of time.

While the UK has made some steps to try and rectify things (as chancellor, Gordon Brown funded the 2-year commission that recommended auto-enrollment and it has worked well), 14 years of Conservative rule have let some very nasty employment practices seep in and poison over a decade of pension funding opportunity. Companies are underpaying employees, Government is overtaxing employees. Only companies coming out on top and seeing record profits while the country wastes away.

Fingers crossed, intervening on this is high on Kier's priorities because our current unfettered capitalist model is a complete mess.

[–] Piatro 5 points 4 months ago

Yes I should have said "employed full-time" probably. This also doesn't account for the self-employed who have to manage it themselves too rather than having their employer do it.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)