Overview & Structure Part 4 - Pension flexibilities
29.This Part contains a series of changes relating to the introduction of the pension flexibilities announced in the Budget 2014. These changes enable the establishment and funding of a pension guidance service along with the framework to supervise guidance providers and placing a duty on pension providers to signpost the service. This Part also introduces a requirement for trustees or managers of pension schemes offering “safeguarded benefits” (i.e. benefits which are neither money purchase nor cash balance) to check that a member has taken appropriate independent advice prior to making a transfer payment, converting those benefits to flexible benefits or paying an uncrystallised funds pension lump sum in respect of those benefits. This is to ensure that members have properly considered the implications of a transfer. This Part also makes provision to ensure that the flexibilities introduced by the Taxation of Pensions Act 2014 work as intended and restricts the circumstances in which benefits may be converted or paid as a lump sum when a scheme is winding up or enters a Pension Protection Fund assessment period. Finally, this Part extends the current transfer rights, giving scheme members with “flexible benefits” a right to transfer up to and beyond their scheme’s normal retirement age; permitting members with any type of benefit to transfer a category of benefit rather than all their benefits under the scheme; restricts transfers out of certain public service defined benefits pension schemes and introduces a power for Ministers to require the cash equivalent transfer value for transfers from funded public service schemes to schemes from which flexible benefits can be obtained to be reduced, in certain circumstances.