Pensions explained: minister to promote importance of retirement planning
As the government gears up to launch its ‘Guidance Guarantee’ to help people approaching retirement make sense of pension reforms, the minister in charge of pensions is to launch the radio equivalent of a soapbox tour.
Minister for Pensions Steve Webb takes to the airwaves this week in the first of a series of radio phone-ins, in which he hopes to give local radio listeners in every part of Britain the chance to quiz him on the government’s pension reforms.
Beginning with a session on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show tomorrow, the minister will repeat his live phone-in surgery every week between now and Christmas, hitting BBC stations serving Scotland, Manchester, Newcastle and Kent.
And the minister plans to continue his commitment into the new year, aiming to cover dozens of local BBC and commercial stations ahead of April next year when major pension reforms come into effect.
The new initiative comes alongside other efforts to help the public better understand how pensions work and make it easier for people to save for the future. Today (17 November 2014), the Department for Work and Pensions also launches PensionTube, a new online hub within the video sharing website YouTube, bringing together content from the government and trusted independent sources that will in time cover the whole spectrum of pension-related issues.
And this comes ahead of a major advertising campaign, themed ‘Your Pension, Your Future’, which will be launched this week to raise awareness of reforms to the State Pension. These changes will turn it into a clearer and fairer foundation for people to build their own retirement saving upon. Minister for Pensions Steve Webb said:
“We are delivering some of the most radical reforms to our pensions system in a generation, introducing a clearer and fairer State Pension and bringing in unprecedented flexibilities that give people the freedom to make their savings work for them.
“It’s only natural that people will have questions about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how it will affect them – and I want the chance to speak to as many of those people as possible.
“Politicians should be accessible and this is a great way for me to engage with people all over the country about pensions in a direct way.”
Dr Ros Altmann, independent pensions expert and the Government’s Business Champion for Older Workers, will be one of the first vloggers to appear on PensionTube, discussing the reforms to the State Pension for people reaching state pension age after April 2016. She said:
“The launch of PensionTube is a great idea and I’m very pleased to be one of the first contributors to this exciting new online resource. There are so many changes going on in pensions at the moment, and people need to know what’s happening.
“All the jargon surrounding pensions can be really confusing, so it is important to have a trusted and accessible source of information that people can use when they want to understand what the changes mean.
“I hope that people will get used to using this and follow all the updates as they are released. The more people can understand pensions, the better they can plan for their future.”
To watch PensionTube go to www.youtube.com/pensiontube
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