Wednesday 21 March 2007

Budget - Brown boosts Financial Assistance Scheme


Excellent news that Brown is increasing the funding to the Financial Assistance Scheme - which provides support to members of pension schemes where the employer went insolvent. There is a reasoanable theoretical argument that the Government should steer clear of the private sector's failures, and a lot of the commentary from the pensions industry was incredibly hypocritical.

But the bottom-line reality was that the people affected deserved to be helped out - this is what Labour governments are for. In addition purely in political terms this was a stick that was being used effectively to beat the Government with. It was giving the impression that Labour wasn't bothered about people who had lost their life's savings. As John Gray said on his blog a while back - it was an own goal.

Nice one Gordon.

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