I have been listening to the rhetoric of MPs with regards to pensions for a long time but over the last few weeks, particularly with regards to one particular party, MPs are attacking pensions again. I feel I must make the following points:

The demographics are changing; people are living longer and the vast majority of the population have insufficient personal pension provision. Without change, there will be significantly more people drawing state pension and fewer taxpayers to fund it. This means that changes to pension legislation are likely to continue to try and reduce the burden on the State.

The State (all major political parties) wants individuals to look after themselves with their own pension provision. The emphasis is definitely to reduce, or at least control, the cost to the State and governments are focused on pushing back State Pension age. This is a win/win for them as they defer paying out State Pensions and keep people at work paying tax.

In order to encourage greater personal pension provision, MPs need to incentivise the working population to pay into pensions rather than suggest changes that curtail benefits to those who save.

There needs to be stability in pension legislation. The issues are complex and the average person has little chance of understanding fully if the picture keeps changing.

As MPs are constantly trying to chip away at pensions for the rest of the population we need to understand their perspective. They have great pension provision in place; heavily funded by the State – our taxes.

The MPs pension provision is in deficit; it has been reviewed to try and control the cost. During the process of review, not surprisingly, the MPs did not want to give up too much of their privileged pension situation.

So the legislators want to implement legislation to reduce our pension benefits whilst at the same time protecting as much of their own ‘Rolls Royce’ pension provision as possible. Hypocrites!