Introduction

This book will aim to provide a basic guide to the issues about pension policy and a critique of some of the dominant ideas and assumptions. The student and the lay reader of newspaper accounts of pension politics are bombarded by a combination of difficult jargon and simplistic assumptions about the way pensions work.This book aims to deepen understanding of the key issues. It will do so both by explaining these and by setting the pensions debate in its wider context.While it is accepted that most of the book’s readers will be from the UK, it is designed to take more than a parochial view of the issues not only in the hope that it will have readers from elsewhere but also because it is important that the special features of the UK pensions debate are explored with an understanding both of the way in which the basic issues are shared with other nations and of the peculiar features of the UK situation. The case for a wide international perspective can be made both in its own terms and in terms of the extent to which comparative analysis deepens understanding of the issues in any one country. It should be added that this book has been prepared at a time when an intense debate has been going on in the UK, with new recommendations to the government and new policies emerging. Naturally these are mentioned and discussed but the book will also take a wider view of the continuing issues about pension policy.

This will not be a book that argues for some simple resolution of issues about pension policy, sweeping aside existing complexity and replacing it by a rational and comprehensive model. Of course the UK has, along with quite a lot of other countries, a pension system that is confusing and full of contradictions. In order to explain how this has come about it is necessary to understand the peculiar politics of pensions. That implies that eliminating the weaknesses of the pensions system is a difficult venture, in which political considerations as much as organisational dilemmas will impose complications.

There are thus two generalisations about policy processes that need to be kept in mind when pension policy is considered. One of these is that actual policies are very often products of compromises between people with different, and often conflicting, values and goals. The other is that policy processes follow ‘pathways’ in which early decisions structure later ones. These two propositions are particularly relevant for pension policy, helping to explain why existing policies are often complex and hard to reform.