Lord Beecham – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Beecham on 2016-09-05.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how much tax has accrued to the Exchequer from the reported removal of £6.1 billion from pension funds since the new pensions flexibility rules were introduced, and how much they estimate will accrue by 2020.

Lord O’Neill of Gatley

The latest estimate of the tax revenue consequences of the introduction of pensions flexibility was set out in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook in March 2016. This stated, in paragraph 4.40, that: “tax from pension withdrawals relating to the pension flexibility measure is expected to be around £0.9 billion for the whole of 2015-16, around £0.2 billion higher than assumed in the original costing”.

The estimated longer term tax impacts of the pensions flexibility measures announced at Budget 2014 were set out in Chart 1.11 (page 45) of the Budget 2014 document.