Why you should still get a SIPP

Gordon Brown's last-minute U-turn on putting residential property into pensions has hogged the headlines, with the financial services industry up in arms. But Self-Invested Personal Pensions are still a great idea, says MoneyWeek editor Merryn Somerset Webb. Find out why you should be applying for one right away...

My husband and I spent last weekend in Lisbon. We could have gone anywhere for the weekend. Perhaps Rome, Paris or Prague. But instead, under the impression that it would have a kind of faded charm about it, we chose Lisbon.

It wasn't quite what we expected. The city is far too faded to have any charm at all. It's a dismal slum of collapsing buildings, filthy streets, closed shops and badly done graffiti, seemingly populated almost entirely by gangs of aggressive beggars.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.