It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to pensions expert, Martin Tilley, a Director of WestBridge SSAS.
As a long-standing advocate of the Small Self-Administered Scheme, my predictions for the industry in 2022 refer to the latest transfer regulations and their impact on this small area of the pensions market.
Pension scams continue to make both industry and national press headlines, so it was no surprise that HM Government felt the need to consult upon and then publish new measures to prevent the transfer of an individual’s pension assets into vehicles that the ceding scheme considered to be, or at least potentially scams. I therefore predict painful times ahead for individuals wishing to transfer their pensions to new arrangements.
Particularly as ceding schemes are now able to determine or interpret their own criteria for flagging a transfer as ‘amber’ and therefore triggering a referral to the Government’s MoneyHelper Service. Potential triggers of amber or even red flags can be “High risk investments,” defined simply as “high end of the normal range of risk in the current financial market” for example, consequently I predict that this service could soon be overrun with referral requests.
I very much doubt that any ceding scheme will want to expend the time necessary to make an in dept analysis of such transfer to be able to come to an informed and common-sense decision. With the emphasis likely to be to err of the side of caution, raising a flag will become the default to the likely detriment of many legitimate transfers to SSASs, and the entrepreneurs of small businesses will be curtailed from being entrepreneurial because this red tape will prevent it.
Perhaps the important point to raise here is that if you want to use a SSAS at some point in the future, it’s best to set up sooner rather than later as the potential delays to registration and transfers could mean that from day one the SSAS is not actually operable for maybe 6 months.
