2012: tackling key issues of our age?

The business guru Peter Drucker once said (something like) "technology is not the greatest challenge of age, but demography is". 2012 is the year when two of the great issues of our age,retirement and long-term funding,are scheduled to (hopefully) get the attention they deserve.

In Spring, the White paper on social care is expected, following on from the Dilnot recommendations last year. Hopefully it will not fudge the funding challenges which we face.

From October, the auto-enrolment of employees into pensions schemes and the launch of NEST (National Employment Savings Scheme) will start to make their mark and will hopefully be well supported and promoted by employees.

These two areas are massive issues and let's hope that the financial services industry also plays a major part in this process, not just to boost their own business potential but to do some social good too.

Company pension schemes and auto-enrolment

The Government announced yesterday that auto-enrolment into a company pension scheme will apply to all companies, whatever their size. This will obviously create more issues for smaller companies where the cost of implementation is disproportionate. But it does mean that future generations of older people, when all this becomes just normal business practice,are likely to have better incomes in retirement. That's the theory anyway. The changes come in from October 2012 for larger companies through to September 2016 for smaller ones.

We'll also be hearing a lot more about NEST (the National Employment Savings Trust) in the next few years. This has been set up by the Government for those organisations who do not have their own pension schemes.

With the default retirement age going in 2011 presenting many firms with an older workforce with some difficulties,followed by these new rules on pensions, employers are really going to have to concentrate some time on older workers. If they need help, they know where I am!