Ryan Shorthouse and Andrew Harrop

August 2018

The last 15 years have seen impressive cross-party consensus on pensions policy, particularly the establishment and extension of auto-enrolment into workplace pensions. This has led to improvements in retirement savings and incomes. But further reforms are required to ensure more people have sufficient resources for retirement. The paper highlights convergence and divergence in thinking on pensions policy between the two main political parties in five key areas: auto-enrolment; support for the self-employed; tax relief on private pensions; the state pension; and the ‘pensions freedoms’. Our judgement is that, while there are clear philosophical and policy differences, in all these areas at least some cross-party consensus can be achieved for ambitious and necessary reforms to pensions.