Pensions Imperilled - The Political Economy of Private Pensions Provision in the Uk

Private pensions provision in the UK is in crisis, yet it is not the crisis often depicted in political and popular discourses. While population ageing has affected traditional pensions practice, the imperilment of UK pensions is due in fact to the peculiar way policy-makers have responded to wider social and economic change. Pensions are a mechanism for managing failed futures, yet this function is being impeded by the individualization of provision.

This book offers a political economy perspective on the development of private pensions, focusing specifically on how policy elites have sought to respond to perceived crises of demographic change, under-saving, and fund deficits, and in doing so have absorbed imperatives to subject individuals to a market-led regime under the influence of neoliberal ideology. This terrain is explored through chapters on the historical and comparative context of UK pensions provision, the demise of collectivist provision, the rise of pensions individualization and the state's role as facilitator and regulator in this regard, and the financial and economic context in which pensions provision operates. By placing the UK system in a comparative context of pensions reform agendas across the world, this book offers an original understanding of the unique temporality and materiality of pensions provision as a set of mechanisms for coping with generational change and forecast failures in capitalist economies. It also presents a nuanced account of the extent to which the state acts to anchor the process of pensions rematerialization and, crucially, concludes by outlining a coherent and radical programme of progressive pensions reform.

List of contents

• 1: Introduction: Pensions Imperilment and Political Economy


• 2: The Liberal Collectivist Experiment: The Historical Development of UK Pensions Provision


• 3: The Pensions Multiverse: Capitalist Diversity and Pensions Transformation


• 4: A Good Innings? The Demise of Collectivism in (Mostly) Private Pensions Provision


• 5: False Dawn: Individualization and the Perversion of Pensions Saving


• 6: Auto-Pilot: The State's Role in Delivering (and Endangering) Workplace Pensions


• 7: Many Happy Returns? Investment Governance and the Political Economy of Time in UK Pensions Provision


• 8: Conclusion: Summary and Policy Options

About the author

Craig Berry is Reader in Political Economy and Deputy Director of Future Economies at Manchester Metropolitan University. His previous roles include Deputy Director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, Policy Advisor at HM Treasury, Pensions Policy Officer at the Trades Union Congress, and Head of Policy and Senior Researcher at the International Longevity Centre. He has also taught at Manchester and Warwick universities, and in 2017 served on the Industrial Strategy Commission. His books include The Political Economy of Industrial Strategy in the UK (with Julie Froud and Tom Barker), Developing England's North (with Arianna Giovannini), Austerity Politics and UK Economic Policy, and Globalisation and Ideology in Britain.

Summary

Private pensions provision in the UK is in crisis. Through a political economy perspective, this book explores how financial security in retirement has been endangered through the response of policy-makers to wider social and economic change, making a unique contribution to our understanding of financialization, neoliberalism, and the welfare state

Additional text

Why does the UK find itself embroiled in a pension crisis? Pensions Imperilled draws on a wealth of research to show that the standard demographic arguments about ageing fall far short. Instead, Berry shows that changes in the UK's political economy, what is commonly referred to as 'financialization', led to policy changes that have made retirement security more precarious and individualized. Pensions Imperilled is a must read that rightly refocuses our attention onto political economy.

Report

Original and thorough, Pensions Imperilled provides a myth-busting analysis of pensions provision as a crucial element of British capitalist management, in comparative perspective. Presenting a unique treatment of temporality, and denouncing the inherent contradiction of an intergenerational collective arrangement that is increasingly premised on individualism and (further) financialization, Berry sounds the alarm for a UK pension crisis that has barely begun. A must-read for a multidisciplinary and truly inter-generational understanding of the perennial policy puzzles involving private pensions. Giselle Datz, Associate Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Product details

• Authors: Craig Berry, Craig (Reader in Political Economy and Depu Berry, Berry Craig
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 12.01.2021
• EAN: 9780198782834
• ISBN: 978-0-19-878283-4
• No. of pages: 352
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Business > Business administration; Pensions, Business & Economics / Investments & Securities / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Economic Policy, Political Economy, Welfare economics