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<p>Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) publish data on their website, based on
what is reported to them, on the number of flexible payments made from pensions, the
number of individuals who have received these flexible payments and the total value
of all flexible payments. As this includes all flexible pension payments, the data
represents a proportion of payments made from trust-based Defined Contribution (DC)
schemes as well as contract-based schemes. As of December 2021, 1.9 million individuals
have taken 16.0 million flexible payments from their DC pensions since the introduction
of Pension Freedoms in 2015.</p><p> </p><p>The Pensions Regulator (TPR) publishes
data on their website from trust-based DC schemes on an annual basis. This publication
provides a high-level snapshot of the current landscape of occupational DC trust-based
pension provision in the UK, including information on the number, memberships, and
assets of schemes. The most recent publication is TPR’s 12<sup>th</sup> edition, DC
Trust: scheme return data 2021 to 2022, which includes data captured since 2015.</p><p>
</p><p>Included in this, they report the number of members for whom each scheme is
directly providing (self-annuitisation) or facilitating (lifetime annuities) annuity
payments. At the end of 2021, there were 1,000 memberships receiving lifetime annuities,
excluding hybrid schemes (which have a mixture of guarantees and investments), and
less than 1000 memberships receiving self-annuitisations, also excluding hybrid schemes.
Number of memberships, or number of pension pots, does not equate to number of individuals,
as many people are members of more than one pension scheme.</p><p> </p><p>The data
in this publication from TPR does not capture all pensioner members, as some members
will have retired but transferred out of their scheme.</p><p> </p><p>Members who transfer
out of a trust-based DC scheme and access their pension savings via a contract-based
provider will be included in the data collected by the Financial Conduct Authority
(FCA) and published in their Retirement Income Market Data. However, data is not currently
collected on volumes of members that transfer out of trust-based DC schemes with the
intention of accessing their savings. The FCA data shows that from October 2015- March
2021, over 3.3 million DC pots have been accessed in the contract-based market. This
data is presented in Table 1 and can be found on the FCA webpage: Retirement income
market data 2020/21. This data is also provided broken down by year in Annex A.</p><p>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><table><tbody><tr><td colspan="3"><p><strong>Table
1: Volumes and proportion of retirement income products, October 2015- March 2021
(FCA Retirement Income Data)</strong></p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Product</p></td><td><p>Total
volume</p></td><td><p>Proportion of all pots accessed</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Annuities
purchased in period</p></td><td><p>390,697</p></td><td><p>12%</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>New
drawdown policies entered and not fully withdrawn in period</p></td><td><p>993,033</p></td><td><p>30%</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Pots
where first partial UFPLS payment taken and not fully withdrawn in period</p></td><td><p>130,247</p></td><td><p>4%</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Full
cash withdrawals from pots being accessed for first time in period</p></td><td><p>1,831,982</p></td><td><p>55%</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Total
pots accessed for the first time</p></td><td><p>3,345,960</p></td><td><p>100%</p></td></tr></tbody></table><p>
</p><p>*Volumes prior to April 2018 were drawn from a representative sample of firms.
The FCA started collecting data from all regulated firms providing retirement income
products from 1 April 2018.</p>
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