Dwindling pension funds plugged by workers’ wages

A decade ago, while working for a national newspaper, I forced the then Labour government to release documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The papers showed that Gordon Brown defied repeated warnings from his own officials about the potentially devastating impact of this £5 billion-a-year raid on pension funds and went ahead with it regardless.

Brown announced the scrapping of tax relief on dividends paid into pension funds in his first Budget in 1997 at a time when many funds were in surplus. It was the single biggest change to the system in a generation. By the time my story was published, the country’s savers had been deprived of at least £100 billion.

It was one of those stories which, in journalism parlance, ‘has legs’. The fallout continued for weeks with the Labour government blaming the CBI, the CBI hitting back saying that was nonsense, the then Shadow Chancellor George Osborne calling for Gordon Brown’s resignation and saying he should be blocked from becoming Prime Minister.