Savings

About The Pensions Review

The Pensions Review – led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in partnership with abrdn Financial Fairness Trust – is a big, 4 ½-year, project to comprehensively assess the consequences of current pension policy, the economic environment and individual behaviour for the future of living standards in retirement. It also provides recommendations for reform to improve outcomes for future generations of pensioners across the UK.

The Review centres on three key questions which we explore in depth:

  1. Are people saving appropriately for retirement, in terms of both the amount and the form of saving, and if not, how can government policies help?
  2. How should the state support people from late working life into and through retirement?
  3. Do people require more assistance to use their wealth appropriately through retirement?

The Review was launched at a public event on April 2023. Preliminary findings are published throughout the following two years. We  published our key findings and recommendations for reform at a launch event in London in early Summer 2025.

If you have a professional or research interest in the subject of pensions or financial security in retirement and have insights to share, we would love to hear from you at: @email. 

Why we're reviewing the UK pensions system

The time is ripe for a comprehensive review of pensions policy.

The economic and policy environment is hugely different from when Lord Turner’s Pensions Commission reported in 2005. The UK has seen a global financial crisis, a COVID-19 pandemic and, most recently, the highest levels of inflation in almost 40 years. Interest rates (at least until mid 2022) have been at historically low levels, homeownership rates have fallen, and there has been a large rise in self-employment with the growth of the gig economy. All of these have consequences for how people are – or should be – saving for retirement.

Policy-wise, the key recommendations of the Pensions Commission were implemented: a more generous state pension, at least for now; a higher state pension age; and automatic enrolment of most employees into workplace pensions. And they were implemented with much success. But the Pensions Commission did not foresee the triple lock, the New State Pension, pension freedoms, and reductions to the generosity of the working-age benefit system, amongst other reforms.

Given the scale of these changes, there has been a dangerous lack of strategic oversight of the retirement saving system since the Pensions Commission disbanded. There is a clear risk that much better outcomes for pensioner incomes in recent years compared with earlier decades could be fuelling complacency that future generations of pensioners will achieve similarly good – or even better – outcomes. It is in this context that we launch our Review.