Gosling's Grouse: The rise of the ISA

GOSLING'S GROUSE

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) estimates so-called ‘free advice' at retirement after the Chancellor's changes to annuities could cost as much as £120m a year, and claims this equates to another 500 fully trained advisers being brought into the industry to provide the advice.

Of course, the tone of PWC’s comment was inevitable: ‘Who is going to pay for this?’ Not an unreasonable comment, because clearly someone will have to and, by one route or another, it will most likely be the individual scheme member/investor/customer, whether they realise it or not. Surely the opportunity for the industry here is not ‘Who is going to pay for it?’ but ‘What can we do to help the investor?’ If the industry does not watch out, it will pass up a brilliant opportunity to explain the value it creates for investors, by going into defensive mode. Every change proposed by g...