REGARDING Yvette Cooper's statement that New Labour wants "to look at how we help people save for their pensions" – as a member of the working class, i.e. one who actually went out to work, I remember New Labour's first Budget.
Gordon Brown withdrew the tax credit from the company pension funds which had the effect of devastating their financial standing, forcing many companies to close their final salary schemes.
A lot of apologists for this result, cite the fact that a
t the time the stock market fell. Indeed it did, these ups and downs have always been an expected feature of financial investment, but a company pension scheme is a very long-term undertaking, a member can be involved for 70-plus years, also a good fund manager can reap benefit from a falling market.
What Gordon Brown did was to deprive the pension funds of part of their income for the last 12 years. And when the "black holes" started to appear and some employers had to change to less expensive schemes, it created a corporate culture that made it acceptable to close any scheme, even good ones.
A lot of companies never liked the commitment and uncertain expense of our final salary schemes.
It would have been different if they had the same cushion as the one granted to MPs. When their unbelievably generous scheme developed a "black hole", they simply went off to the Treasury for a skipload of (public) money to fill it with.
Gordon Brown makes Robert Maxwell look like a fairy godmother.
DAVID MOON
Knottingley
