False Dawn

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-170
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
Economic Governance ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

The introduction of auto-enrolment in the UK is a genuinely transformative moment. While the earlier neoliberal ‘revolution’ in wider economic governance encompassed important changes to pensions policy and provision, auto-enrolment encompasses an extensive set of reforms designed to alter how the vast majority of people engage with private pensions provision. However, the flaws in the approach established by the Pensions Commission in the mid-2000s—arising largely from its acceptance of the dominance of defined contribution—have created myriad new challenges for policy-makers, and indeed enabled subsequent elites to reinforce individualized and marketized provision (with inegalitarian outcomes) in a way that severely undermines the Commission’s plan. The chapter explores the hugely flawed imaginary of the individual and rationality encompassed by elite support for defined contribution saving, and the crude behavioural assumptions upon which auto-enrolment is based.

Gender perspectives on extended working life policies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Áine Ní Léime ◽  
Wendy Loretto
Keyword(s):  
Working Life ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Population Policies ◽  
Flexible Working ◽  
Working Set ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pension Age ◽  
Pension Contribution ◽  
The Uk ◽  
State Pension

This chapter documents international policy developments and provides a gender critique of retirement, employment and pension policies in Australia, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, the UK, and the US. It assesses the degree to which the individual country's extended working life policies have adopted the agenda (increasing pension age and introducing flexible working) set out by the OECD and the EU. Policies include raising state pension age, changes in the duration of pension contribution requirements, the move from defined benefits to defined contribution pensions, policies on caring for vulnerable members of the population, policies enabling flexible working and anti-age discrimination measures. An expanded framework is used to assess the degree to which gender and other intersecting issues such as health, caring, class, type of occupation and/or membership of minority communities have (or have not) been taken into account in designing and implementing policies extending working life.

Auto-Pilot

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-208
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Tax Relief ◽  
Individual Welfare ◽  
Regulatory Regimes ◽  
The Uk

This chapter considers in depth some of the key elements of the new landscape of individualized pensions provision in the UK, reflecting in particular on some of the state’s emerging functions as facilitator, regulator, and provider of defined contribution pensions. It charts how the Pensions Commission’s vision for state-managed defined contribution was subtly marginalized, resulting in an approach which enables and indeed privileges privatized delivery of auto-enrolment, leaving private pensions provision caught between two radically different regulatory regimes, and rendering the state unable to act decisively to protect individual welfare. The chapter also discusses decumulation processes, including the Coalition government’s radical and highly destructive reforms to the annuities market, and the peculiar role played by pensions tax relief—providing a largely ineffective saving incentive, albeit at great expense.

Is there a place in the UK Defined Contribution pensions market for a guaranteed savings product?

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 624-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Eason ◽  
P. Barker ◽  
G. Foroughi ◽  
J. Harsant ◽  
D. Hunter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Investment Risk ◽  
Occupational Pension ◽  
Defined Benefit ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Tax Relief ◽  
Investment Returns ◽  
Pension Saving ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

AbstractThe UK has seen a significant transition from Defined Benefit (“DB”) to Defined Contribution (“DC”) for occupational pension saving. The planned automatic enrolment program starting in 2012 is expected to increase the use of DC. The main features of DC are that investment risk falls onto the individual during the pre-retirement phase and that there are no guarantees as to investment returns or the level of pension. In July 2012, Steve Webb, the Pensions Minister, challenged industry to think hard about meeting the need for more certainty about pension savings in DC plans and to consider providing an affordable ‘Money Safe’ guarantee where the member would get back at least the nominal value of their contributions (individual, employer and tax relief). This paper explores whether this is viable for the mass market.

scholarly journals Structural Contingencies: Capitalist Constraints and Historical Contingency in the Rise and Fall of Pensions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Pension System ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Structural Condition ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Historical Factors

After World War II, collectively bargained private pensions were installed as an alternative to Social Security expansions. But these plans began to go into decline in the 1980s, when defined-contribution retirement accounts, such as 401(k)s, came to replace them. This article makes three arguments about this rise and fall to contribute toward a theory of structural contingency. First, in both episodes, state intervention into labor-management relations triggered policy changes in the private pension system. Second, policy makers were motivated to intervene because of a structural condition—namely, to manage perceived crises in capitalism. And third, the particular way they intervened and how their policy choices spurred pension marketization were driven by contingent historical circumstances. This article argues that structural constraints that inhere in capitalist democracies established a range of possible policy options available to policy makers, yet contingent and historical factors channeled policy selection within that range.

scholarly journals An analysis of the Dutch-style pension plans proposed by UK policy-makers

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
IQBAL OWADALLY ◽  
RAHIL RAM ◽  
LUCA REGIS
Keyword(s):  
Risk Sharing ◽  
Pension Plans ◽  
Retirement Savings ◽  
Investment Strategies ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Replacement Rate ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Pension Schemes ◽  
Simulation Based ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Collective Defined Contribution (CDC) pension schemes are a variant of collective pension plans that are present in many countries and especially common in the Netherlands. CDC schemes are based on the pooled management of the retirement savings of all members, thereby incorporating inter-generational risk-sharing features. Employers are not subject to investment and longevity risks as these are transferred to plan members collectively. In this paper, we discuss policy related to the proposed introduction of CDC schemes to the UK. By means of a simulation-based study, we compare the performance of CDC schemes vis-à-vis typical Defined Contribution schemes under different investment strategies. We find that CDC schemes may provide retirees with a higher income replacement rate on average, together with less uncertainty.

scholarly journals Market Values and Youth Political Engagement in the UK: Towards an Agenda for Exploring the Psychological Impacts of Neo-Liberalism

Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Allsop ◽  
Jacqueline Briggs ◽  
Ben Kisby
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Market Values ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Democratic Norms ◽  
Liberal Thought

This article seeks to develop a preliminary analysis of how neo-liberal thought and policies have impacted on youth political engagement in the UK, specifically by attempting to understand how macro-economic and other public policies can influence the individual psychology of citizens and their subsequent behaviour. The article sets out a clear definition and explanation of neo-liberalism and summarises six key neo-liberal impacts particularly pertinent to political engagement: marketisation and the tension this brings with democratic norms; responsibilisation narratives; increased inequality; the changing character of the state through privatisation and deregulation; the preference among policy-makers for ‘expert rule’; and repression of labour. It argues that the main psychological effects that result, and which underpin and define the personal experience of neo-liberal policy, are declines in political efficacy and increases in individualism, the ramifications of which for political engagement are discussed.

Sisterhood and After

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cultural Taste

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.

Punk as Folk: Continuities and Tensions in the UK and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Dale
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Collective Creativity ◽  
Living Tradition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

Numerous claims have been made by a wide range of commentators that punk is somehow “a folk music” of some kind. Doubtless there are several continuities. Indeed, both tend to encourage amateur music-making, both often have affiliations with the Left, and both emerge at least partly from a collective/anti-competitive approach to music-making. However, there are also significant tensions between punk and folk as ideas/ideals and as applied in practice. Most obviously, punk makes claims to a “year zero” creativity (despite inevitably offering re-presentation of at least some existing elements in every instance), whereas folk music is supposed to carry forward a tradition (which, thankfully, is more recognized in recent decades as a subject-to-change “living tradition” than was the case in folk’s more purist periods). Politically, meanwhile, postwar folk has tended more toward a socialist and/or Marxist orientation, both in the US and UK, whereas punk has at least rhetorically claimed to be in favor of “anarchy” (in the UK, in particular). Collective creativity and competitive tendencies also differ between the two (perceived) genre areas. Although the folk scene’s “floor singer” tradition offers a dispersal of expressive opportunity comparable in some ways to the “anyone can do it” idea that gets associated with punk, the creative expectation of the individual within the group differs between the two. Punk has some similarities to folk, then, but there are tensions, too, and these are well worth examining if one is serious about testing out the common claim, in both folk and punk, that “anyone can do it.”

scholarly journals One size does not fit all: Constructing complementary digital reskilling strategies using online labour market data

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172110031
Author(s):  
Fabian Stephany
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Grand Challenge ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
National Education ◽  
Global Challenge ◽  
Cognitive Work ◽  
National Education Systems ◽  
Skill Requirements ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Value Of Learning

Digital technologies are radically transforming our work environments and demand for skills, with certain jobs being automated away and others demanding mastery of new digital techniques. This global challenge of rapidly changing skill requirements due to task automation overwhelms workers. The digital skill gap widens further as technological and social transformation outpaces national education systems and precise skill requirements for mastering emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, remain opaque. Online labour platforms could help us to understand this grand challenge of reskilling en masse. Online labour platforms build a globally integrated market that mediates between millions of buyers and sellers of remotely deliverable cognitive work. This commentary argues that, over the last decade, online labour platforms have become the ‘laboratories’ of skill rebundling; the combination of skills from different occupational domains. Online labour platform data allows us to establish a new taxonomy on the individual complementarity of skills. For policy makers, education providers and recruiters, a continuous analysis of complementary reskilling trajectories enables automated, individual and far-sighted suggestions on the value of learning a new skill in a future of technological disruption.

scholarly journals European Youth Work Policy and Young People’s Experience of Open Access Youth Work

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
JON ORD ◽  
MARC CARLETTI ◽  
DANIELE MORCIANO ◽  
LASSE SIURALA ◽  
CHRISTOPHE DANSAC ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Young People ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Youth Work ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
European Youth

Abstract This article examines young people’s experiences of open access youth work in settings in the UK, Finland, Estonia, Italy and France. It analyses 844 individual narratives from young people, which communicate the impact of youthwork on their lives. These accounts are then analysed in the light of the European youth work policy goals. It concludes that it is encouraging that what young people identify as the positive impact of youth work are broadly consistent with many of these goals. There are however some disparities which require attention. These include the importance young people place on the social context of youth work, such as friendship, which is largely absent in EU youth work policy; as well as the importance placed on experiential learning. The paper also highlights a tension between ‘top down’ policy formulation and the ‘youth centric’ practices of youth work. It concludes with a reminder to policy makers that for youth work to remain successful the spaces and places for young people must remain meaningful to them ‘on their terms’.

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