Yesterday’s long-awaited Green Paper ("Simplicity, security and choice: Working and Saving for Retirement"), is overshadowed by the accompanying, genuinely radical, paper from the Inland Revenue ("Simplifying the taxation of pensions: increasing choice and flexibility for all" [PDF]) which abolishes all Revenue Limits as we know them.

For a 12-point summary of the main Revenue proposals (which bear the imprimatur of the Treasury), Aries Members login here.

The DWP's Green Paper is a wide-ranging consultation about a future pensions policy framework. A new pensions regulator (which might be a reincarnation of Opra, whose 5-yearly review report is published alongside the Green Paper) is to be set up to focus on schemes where a high risk of fraud or maladministration is perceived. The Government also announces that entrants to the public service from 2006 will need to work until 65 rather than 60 to get a full pension.

Otherwise, in posing lots of questions ("We would welcome views . . .") but few specific answers, the Green Paper will disappoint those clamouring for swift action to address a perceived 'crisis' in UK pension provision. It picks up many of the recommendations made by Alan Pickering but fails to convert them into decisions. Whether the DWP had some concrete proposals for simplification which failed to get past the Treasury and/or No. 10 we may never know.

For a 12-point summary of the main ideas to emerge from the Green Paper and its associated Technical Paper, Aries Members login here.