A new tranche of amendments to the Registered Pension Schemes Manual (RPSM) has been published today. This is a major update: about 200 pages have been amended or added, the great majority being Technical Pages. Apart from a small set of amendments to Chapter 2 on the scheme registration process published on 1 October, these are the first changes to the RPSM since 20 April this year (see Aries report).

Many of the amendments aim to bring the guidance into line with the changes made to the pensions tax regime made by this year's Finance Act. Some are to clarify or correct problems with the text raised by users, including Aries. All Chapters of the Manual have been altered, except Chapter 6 (Annual Allowance). We are also aware of minor changes to about a dozen other pages, such as corrections to broken hyperlinks and spelling errors; these have not been included in the update announcement.

We are now working to update the Aries Pensions System accordingly. All the published amendments will be included in the next release, scheduled for the second week in January 2008. Aries incorporates a complete and fully-searchable copy of the entire Manual, as well as our own concise summary. Aries' extensive guidance for pensions professionals on the practical application of UK pensions legislation includes hot links to the relevant pages of the RPSM.

The RPSM remains a work in progress. It may now have caught up with pensions tax legislation in force, but as we know, there are more changes yet in the pipeline to the FA 2004 regime. Announcements with October's Pre-Budget Report (see previous Aries articles here and here) identified half a dozen significant aspects already scheduled for further attention in the Finance Act 2008. Some of these are intended to be made retrospective to 6 April 2006, and so HMRC recently announced that

"where scheme administrators act in accordance with the announcements or draft legislation as appropriate neither they nor members will be subject to HMRC sanctions for failing to operate in accordance with the existing legislation."