How do you balance company and worker pension regulations?
As we covered in one of our earlier post, the CBI has recently been very vocal in support of UK businesses and a change in pension regulations. Historically companies were able to take a more long-term approach to their pension fund investments which allowed for short-term fluctuations such as recessions, as well as the boom times. However, in a bid to try and balance out and protect both pension payments for employees and pension investment strategies for pension fund trustees, a significantly shorter review time-span was put in place.
This has seen companies forced to announce, as well as fill, potential black holes which may have arisen because of instances such as recessions and short-term investment fluctuations. The real concern is that pension funding issues increase in the bad times when companies around the UK need their cash flow more than ever for survival. Whether the UK government and the authorities will take note of the CBI's comments remains to be seen as there are some sympathetic to employees and others sympathetic to corporate UK.
On the whole many people believe there should be a significant change in the overall UK pensions industry with regulations reviewed and timescales reconsidered. However, over recent years we have seen some high-profile pension fund crashes which have seen the UK government take a more cautious and take a short term approach, towards what in reality is a long-term investment.
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