Jury still out?

Depending on your point of view Gordon Brown is either the rottweiler who robbed occupational and personal pension schemes of billions of pounds of tax refunds through his reform of company dividend tax or the poodle who given the chance of realigning the pensions tax regime in favour of ordinary working people instead caved in to the special pleading of that elite group of judges MPs senior civil servants and others with their million pound plus tax subsidised pension pots.

In Mr Brown's defence the 'tax raid' on dividend tax has probably cost pension schemes less than some commentators have claimed. Furthermore given that Parliament will not countenance retrospective taxation measures some form of transitional protection from the new lifetime allowance tax charge was probably an unavoidable component of the pensions tax simplification measures introduced by Finance Act 2004.

But one...