Beware: the government could come for your pension assets

The government desperately needs to find a pile of cash to pay for its massive debt. And there's a very attractive-looking one sitting in your pension pot.

You’re a deeply-in-debt government; your deficit is running at 11.8% of GDP. That’s not as bad as it could have been, but, given the national debt is now at its highest since the 1960s, it isn’t exactly good either. You’ve also made a lot of promises – green revolutions, levelling up, and the financing of social care. Your prime minister has promised that no one will have to sell their totemic “family home” to pay for the latter. What do you do?

In an ideal world you’d find a pile of cash that, while technically owned by voters, is mostly inaccessible to them in the short term; that many don’t even know they have; and that is considered to be head-in-sand-style complicated by most of the remainder. In the UK we have just the thing: a huge pile of private pension assets.

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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.