Introduction

This chapter brings this book to a conclusion through an examination of the outstanding challenges to pension policy worldwide, an exploration of the UK government’s current reform proposals and finally some personal conclusions by the author.

The stance throughout the book has been to see pension policy issues as:

• • involving conflicts between views of pensions as essentially deferred earned income and as ways of ensuring adequate incomes for all in old age, with actual policies being varying compromises between these two perspectives;

• • complicated by the ways in which public and private arrangements exist side by side;

• • following ‘pathways’ established early in the history of government interventions from which politicians have difficulties in diverging given the high costs involved and the need to combine current concerns with a long-term perspective.

The examination of the history of pensions shows a steady growth in complexity in which reform proposals have to relate to elaborate existing systems and difficult problems about forecasting future effects but sit within what are very often short-term political agendas.The applicability of that generalisation will, of course, vary from place to place; some nations (for reasons linked to their political and institutional structures) seem to be better at handling these issues (Sweden and Germany seem to offer model cases). The history of pension policy in the UK suggests that it lies at the extreme other end in this respect; there have been many twists and turns of policy and a range of incremental changes that are often poorly related to each other.

The contemporary pension debate is very influenced by predictions about the impact of demographic change. These were questioned in Chapter Six. Responses to that issue are very often cast in terms of a need to increase the funded element in pension systems. The dominance of that perspective was challenged in Chapter Seven. Pension reform is now widely seen as about the downgrading of pension promises and the cutting of the pension costs that will have to be met by governments through tax and social insurance increases. Various comparative studies casting the issues in these terms will be discussed below.