Public sector workers are about to lose their unfair tax advantage

Public sector workers pay 9.4% in National Insurance.Private sector workers pay 11%. Merryn Somerset Webb explains why.

Is Iain Duncan Smith's universal pension of £140 a week a good idea? I think it is. £140 in 2016 (which is when it might start) won't represent much of a real rise in payments to most people, but that isn't really the point.

What a universal pension will do is to clear away our unbelievably complicated state pension system and replace it with something that is actually possible to understand. It will also junk the perverse incentive we currently offer people not to save: why bother if all your savings will do is disqualify you from getting means-tested benefits? And it will cut the costs of pension administration (employing people to do the means testing is expensive) and end the way in which women are penalised in retirement for their child-rearing years.

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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.