Thanks Gareth this is interesting and if anyone knows of any work assessing outcomes I would also be interested in seeing it. The situation is of course more complex than this with many pensioners married, and also potentially having other sources of capital and income.
I am not sure there is any source of data that collects the variables you would need to answer this question (again, if anyone knows of one I would be interested) since you would need to know what choices people were making about individual pension pots as well as a host of other information about their financial lives. I have done a fair amount of research over the years on individual and couple income in later life - it is time consuming to do as you need nationally representative large household datasets that collect detail on all sources of income and household status (such as Understanding Society, the Family Resources Survey, or ELSA) and these tend to be released to the wider research community a couple of years after collection - for example Wave 5 of Understanding Society which is available for analysis now was collected between Q1 2013- and Q4 14). The DWP used to helpfully produce an annual series called something like the Individual Income Series drawn from the FRS and relatively timely which was excellent but it was discontinued I think in 2006, although it wouldn't have contained data on choices made and there is also always this time lag with complex national datasets even though the DWP has first access. There was also an excellent technical paper produced some years ago by the DWP called something like "Asking people about pensions" which revealed how difficult it is to collect accurate pension information from individuals in household datasets. We found this too in a recent article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X15000690 - we had to combine what people said were their state pensions and their pension credit because it was clear from our initial research descriptives of the data that many people were confusing the two.
The interactions with means testing have always thrown up some of the most complex issues for the most vulnerable people. And caught as everyone is in the headlights of not being able to give "advice" because of regulatory regimes (I wrote a blog about this a couple of years ago: https://gerontologyuk.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/pensions-advice-guidance-does-it-matter/) , I think this throws up some really important questions.
Debbie
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Debora Price
Professor of Social Gerontology and Director of MICRA
Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing
The University of Manchester
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From: Social-Policy is run by SPA for all social policy specialists [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Gareth Morgan [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 14 April 2016 11:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Pensioners' incomes
Dear All
I have been looking at the effect making different choices among the new pension freedoms has on the net income of pensioners with average or lower pension savings. The differences can be substantial, particularly when taking lump sums rather than regular income (see my note at http://bit.ly/1VrupWS if interested).
I am wondering if there has been any research which has looked at the actual effect of choices made by pensioners. There are statistics on the type and number of choices made but I have been unable to find any work on the consequences on bottom line incomes.
I'd be very grateful for any pointers.
Gareth Morgan
Ferret Information Systems
See my welfare reform blog and papers at http://blog.cix.co.uk/gmorgan
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