Thatcherite Pensions Reform (and some lessons for today): Presentation to the Pensions Commission

The paper reviews the implementation of individualised defined contribution pensions in the 1980s (both via personal pensions and by allowing DC occupational pension schemes). It explores why Thatcher-era reform architects found it so difficult to replace the entire public-private architecture of top-up pensions above the minimalist basic state pension, the political U-turn away from those revolutiuonary aims to a more evolutionary reform package, and its malign legacy. It concludes that, as a concept, defined contribution pensions have now failed not once but twice since 1945, and asks whether the time might have come to rediscover the virtues of defined benefit pensions - albeit in a more sustainable form.