UK pension fund gap reaches £318 billion a year
A report by Aviva and Deloitte has today cast a very dark shadow on the UK pension fund industry with the revelation of a £318 billion a year shortfall in pension funding in the UK. Each and every adult retiring over the next 50 years will need to put away over £10,000 a year to close the pension fund gap which is defined as the difference between income required for a comfortable living and that currently available from pension funding at the moment.
Even though the German pension funding gap is £393 billion a year this only equates to £9700 per annum for every individual set to retire over the next 50 years. So the UK public have the largest pension fund deficit in the whole of Europe which is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Defenders of the UK pension fund industry will always hark back to the time when Gordon Brown introduced a number of tax charges to the pension fund sector thereby stripping pension funds of much-needed liquidity.
If you look at the tax charges now associated with pension funds on an annual basis it looks fairly innocuous but when you spread this over 50 years, bearing in mind income lost and potential returns on lost funds, you soon begin to appreciate the severity of the problem.
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