On 12/02/2018 20:14, Roger Hayter wrote:
And you fail to mention the employer's
contribution which was quite large. And, interestingly, GPs have to pay
the employer's contribution out of their gross remuneration, as
self-employed. And even all that is subject to a maximum pension pot of
1.2M which is equivalent to a relatively moderate final salary.


And who is the 'employer' ??. The rest of us. Taxpayers.

And the pension lifetime allowance unfairly penalises private
pensions compared to public servants where a nominal 20x factor
is used to arrive at a notional value, when it should be 40x
based on current 10-year gilt yields.

A head teacher on £100K (and there are a *lot* of them) will
get a pension of £50K and a tax-free lump sum of £150K. Or under
the 2011 changes they can forgo a small amount of pension and
push that lump sum up by another £100K.

To buy an RPI pension that pays £50K from age 60 you would need a fund
of over £2 million, but because a factor of only 20 is applied, the
head teacher avoids the LifeTime tax charge of ** 55% **. However,
anyone with a private pension fund of £2 million would have the
excess over and above £1 million (your figures are out of date!),
taxed at 55%, so in fact someone in the private sector wishing
to have a pension of £50K would need a fund of getting on for
£3 million. Remember, this is for one single head teacher, and there
are about 6,000 of them.