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Pensions policy must suit women as well, warns expert
25 April 2008 12:00
The government must ensure its new pensions regime suits women as well as men and should cater to their needs better than it currently does, an industry expert has claimed.
Research conducted by Scottish Widows back in November indicated that just over two out of five women capable of saving for retirement were actually doing so, compared to over half of their male counterparts.
Yet Scottish Life's head of pensions strategy Steve Bee is concerned that automatically enrolling women into personal accounts will not help them either, arguing that people would be better off auto-enrolled into other types of long-term savings vehicles anyway.
He explained that women are not helped by the government's assumptions that everyone has a full basic state pension and that female lives and work patterns now more closely resemble male ones and they therefore suit pension products designed for men.
Instead, Mr Bee called on the government to enable far more women to retire on a full state pension than the one in three who currently do, to permit them to buy back missing years of national insurance contributions and to put proper advice structures in place.
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