UK pensions minister John Hutton had mad a somewhat unexpected attack on the IFA community in a speech in London, according to trade press reports. Mr Hutton in particular admitted that some elements of the Turner report were designed to exclude IFAs from the pensions advice system.
IFA Online reports that Mr Hutton acknowledged the role of Lord Turner’s National Pensions Savings Scheme (NPSS) was partly to limit the cost impact of independent advice on the pension system.
The purpose of the NPSS is to reduce the costs by removing expensive highly tailored independent financial advice, Mr Hutton is quoted as saying after a speech at the Work Foundation think tank.
He went on to criticize the IFA community for building added cost into the Stakeholder pension system, which has failed to encourage greater saving among consumers. Mr Hutton claimed that expensive advice was one of the reasons why Stakeholder management charges were not less than 1%, the report added.