I left a big company, lets call it ICI, some years ago and now
work for another, lets call it IBM. I earn 30K at IBM, and
am paying equal amounts with the company into a pension
scheme. My ICI pension of 15K has now kicked in, on
which I pay a lot of tax. Can I up my IBM pension
contributions and get more tax relief?
|P
Are you sure you want to? Quoting from
www.amipp.org.uk:
"For decades [IBM] obtained a talented, loyal, un-unionised workforce by
a practice of being competitive with leading companies in all of its
benefits. In answering a question about pensions in payment (PIP), ie
how the value of pensions is affected by inflation, IBM confirmed and
documented that for PIP, like all the other benefits, it aimed to be
competitive with leading companies. This was only an "aim" because IBM's
economic circumstances might have prevented it. Another document
explains the constraint of affordability.
IBM's PIP practice has been the worst of all comparable companies. It
turns out that this is not due to affordability, but to a mechanical
rule for degrading the value of pensions, irrespective of economic
conditions or what other companies did. This transition from "One of the
Best", in practice and predicted, to actually "One of the Worst" took
place after many people had retired".