September 1st, 2010
Further to today’s earlier post, Money Marketing tells me that Tony Blair explained part of the disagreement with Gordon Brown thus -
Blair adds:“(Brown) was in favour of rebalancing rich and poor in provision of the basic state pension. I was totally opposed to that. I felt the public at large would consider the basic state pension as their ‘dividend’ or ‘entitlement’ for their national insurance contributions.”
I will investigate this further but to me that reads like Brown wanted to rebalance - for which read redistribute - the state pension, which means he was suggesting even more means-testing.
Now this may all have been simply a matter of trying to obstruct a reform Brown didn’t like. Certainly I don’t remember any such plans leaking. If it had, surely the headlines would have read “Brown wants to means test the state pension.”
It is however eerily similar to an accusation Blair made in public about the Tories’ pension plans just before the 1997 election, though in that case ..read more
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September 1st, 2010
Look – pensions on the front page again! Sort of.
We now know that Tony Blair felt he was effectively blackmailed by Gordon Brown over the Government’s policy response to Adair Turner’s pensions review.
Gordon Brown allegedly suggested that he would push forward an internal Labour party investigation into loans for honours if Blair embraced Turner. Blair did. There was an investigation. Anyway this much we know from today’s papers.
No-one says exactly what it was Brown objected to about the pension reform. Just Adair Turner himself? The suggested need to increase the state retirement age? The perceived difficulty of balancing the need for a low cost pension with need to incentivise existing distribution (that’s you) to distribute something? It could be Turner’s criticism or at least concerns about mean-testing? That could be it.
Yet it might simply be the fact that the proposed personal accounts as became Nest/auto-enrolment system wasn’t Brown’s baby and in Brown’s mind he was chief executive and Blair just the Chairman in charge of stuff like badly planned wars.
Maybe Brown saw all sorts of problems with implementation ..read more
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August 26th, 2010
I must say I really did think it was April FOS day when I read of the FOS taking part in National Complaints Day. The FOS admittedly wasn’t directly offering an Ipad for best complaint, but the organising firm Complaint Community was.
Any complaints system, any Ombudsman system, particularly a free one, ought to tread carefully. It has to promote its service – better than the alternative of course, but it has to be careful not to stir up unfair claims. This shows it isn’t doing anything of the sort.
I think it is also time that the FOS adjudications were vetted, i.e. take a number of files across different categories of cases, and have them checked for fairness to both parties to the dispute and for consistency.
Whether you want a FOS to exist or not, if it is run the wrong way it is a huge drag on saving and investing levels, it makes doing all sorts of business for all sorts ..read more
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Posted in Industry, Regulation and Politics | 2 Comments »
The FOS has continually claimed ‘independence’ and argued that it is not a consumer champion and does not encourage claims.
This ill-thought out dallying with seedy claims promoters does nothing to dispel such views. Far worse, it confirms in the minds of advisers that they are partisan and therefore unworthy.
The new Chief Ombudsman was formerly in charge of the British Library and one would have hoped that at some stage she would have ingested the meaning of ‘balanced and fair’ from the tomes that surrounded her daily.
That’s ‘daily’ by the way, not ‘Daley’ as in Arthur.
You just could not make it up…
Who at the FOS thought this was wise…?