Pensions: One rule for the many and another for the very lucky few UNTIL Thursday I was planning to write about the latest ­obsession of the financial services regulators. The retail distribution review (RDR), coming into effect at the end of the month, is yet another ill-conceived interference with the savings industry that's being imposed at horrendous cost, and which will probably deliver nothing positive in practice to the vast majority of savers. But then the chancellor stands up and tells us that yet again he's decided to change the tax law relating to pension contributions. He is reducing how much can be paid in every year and also the size of the fund you can have at retirement before your tax-free cash is reduced and your marginal tax on income increased. Guess who these further restrictions don't apply to? Now if you thought judges, you're right, as seven years ago, when the previous government tried to introduce similar retrospective changes, the lordships simply said they'd retire right away to avoid the extra taxes. So they were exempted. They still are. But guess who else is unaffected by this annual assault on pension saver? If you said the prime minister, the speaker of the house and the chancellor of the exchequer, you're spot on again. George Osborne isn't ­affected by this pension attack. So, it's ­alright for him. How long do we have to put up with this? I listened to an interview on the radio with a pensions" expert when the interviewer suggested these changes were fine because they only affected 1 or 2 per cent of pensioners. That's missing the point. Governments who get away with ­attacking high earners in pension funds inevitably will start hitting others - think about Equitable Life policyholders for ­example. Until Gordon Brown thought retrospective legislation on pensions was okay in 1997, if you invested in pensions you were protected. For a start, Law of Contract clearly applied. And pension savers were protected by a legitimate right to benefit. That's what judges believed, which is why they threatened en masse to retire immediately. Pensions have always fallen into two camps - those where premium input is restricted yearly and others where the benefits are restricted. Apparently, nowadays folk like ­Osborne think it's acceptable to apply both and keep changing their mind every five minutes. One main retrospective ­restriction called lifetime ­allowance was introduced in 2006. By 2014 that allowance will have fallen over 30 per cent, and that ignores inflation. And all this is going on at the same time as the Financial Services Authority imposes RDR on investors. What's it supposed to achieve? They claimed it's to do away with commission and replace it with fees. Now, at the last minute - RDR applies from Hogmanay - they say that's not what they intend. In a recent statement they say advisers can keep receiving ­commission, especially if they refrain from giving advice. Does that sound sensible to you? Nope, me neither. RDR is supposed to introduce transparency. That's nonsense. Transparency has been around since at least 1995 - and if you do not know what charges or commissions have been levied on you, somebody's been breaking the law. So what will RDR achieve? It's already created uncertainty, will increase costs to investors and reduce the number of experienced independent advisers who can't be bothered having to pass more exams this late in their careers. They're leaving when experience has never ­mattered more. The word is that a majority of IFAs and wealth managers are using RDR as an excuse to increase their charges. Many charges are being doubled while service is reduced. Meanwhile the experts on the telly stir up our fears with their obsession of one problem after another. So investors nowadays have to put up with governments that renege on promises and see serious investors as easy targets. Meanwhile, we have ­regulators who wouldn't recognise good advice if it jumped out of their soup at them, and pundits who focus on bad news. It's a ­miracle we've managed to save at all. Hopefully I'll snuff it before age 75 and pass my pension fund on to the family free of any tax. And that could well happen, because I have taken great care to make sure that I've used up my lifetime ­allowance of pies and red wine! Alan Steel is chairman of Alan Steel Asset Management