The financial planning sector in Australia has won a major battle to blunt the government’s reforms aimed at restoring trust in the financial services sector. The government has made a significant change to the hotly contested ‘opt-in’ provision of the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reform, which dictates that advisers must ask their clients regularly …

The howl of outrage that has greeted the budget from the pensioners needs to be heard with an amount of scepticism. There is no real argument for treating pensioners more generously, in terms of tax allowances, than those in the productive sector of the economy. The allowances also cause a huge amount of extra work …

As the Chancellor sits in his study in No. 11 and ponders the fate of the higher rate tax relief on pension contributions, you have to be a bit sympathetic to his dilemma. Overall his basic political philosophy would push him to encourage people to save for their own retirement provision. However, given the state …

As soon as the news broke in November that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) had decided to interfere with legacy policies and bring them under the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) umbrella, you just knew they were setting out to make life difficult. And so it proved, with the rules released this week concerning legacy policies …