The Pensions Law Handbook, ninth edition, takes a comprehensive look at the legal side of pensions, which can often be an overwhelming and complex topic, and helps readers to cope with the massive volume of legislation that continues to flood the pensions world.
Written by the Nabarro pensions team and published by Bloomsbury Professional, this book deals with the duties and responsibilities of key personnel involved with pensions and the law applicable to specific tasks, such as contracting out, early leavers, reconstruction, winding-up, funding and surplus.
This latest addition of the handbook takes full account, as one would expect, of changes to the pensions law regime including implementation of the Pensions Act 2004 and the Finance Act 2004, the Pensions Act 2008 and the Finance Act 2009; increased powers of the Pensions Regulator; new employer debt regulations; the latest developments on automatic enrolment; and recent cases on equalisation.
Contributors have aimed to state the law as at the end of August 2009, but where there have been later developments in time for publication, these have been clearly asserted.
One of the most significant changes since the last edition is that the chapter on Small Self Administered Schemes (SSAS) has been removed and the Personal Pension Scheme chapter has been expanded to include details on the new National Employment Savings Trust (NEST), however, it is important to note that the handbook still refers to this by its old name of Personal Accounts.
This detailed book is a must-have for anyone needing to know about the legal side of pensions and joint editors – Jennifer Bell, partner at Nabarro, and Susan Jones, solicitor at the firm – have organised the book to be as accessible and helpful as possible.
Certainly the changes proposed for the near future, such as the introduction of auto-enrolment and NEST in 2012, will mean that having a comprehensive and clear account of the law affecting pensions will be more important than ever.
Pensions Age
June 2010
Pg 18
Whole Lotta Law
You’ve probably been thinking that bookshelf in your office is looking a little under-utilised and have been in the market for a tome that is both useful and suitably heavyweight to make you look more professional before your colleagues.
Well, that book has arrived in the shape of the ninth edition of the perennial favourite
Pensions Law Handbook from Bloomsbury Professional.
Written by the pensions team at law firm Nabarro, its contributors include doyen(ne)s of the pensions community Ian Greenstreet and Anne-Marie Winton.
This book covers the A to Z of pensions law, although as we are dealing with lawyers, it had better be made clear that there are no entries under Z in the index, nor X or Y for that matter. But it covers just about everything a pensions professional or even a trustee could wish to know.
Even a trustee, I hear you ask? Well, yes. Although written by a community famed for eschewing verbiage in favour of concise, but impenetrable prose, this book is extremely accessible. Topics are easy to read and clearly set out.
If you have it on a high shelf, you may want to ask someone to get it down for you if you are of short stature. Likewise, if you pick it up from the floor, keep your back straight and bend those knees. It’s a paperback, but 900 pages long, so it’s not a pocket guide. But don’t let that put you off, as it really is packed full of useful information.
And PM has secured its readers a 10% discount, which you can take advantage of provided you order it by the end of June. Simply go to Bloomsbury’s site at tinyurl.com/PM-law-book and add it to the shopping basket. Enter the voucher code PMM10 at the checkout and the 10% discount will be applied automatically. You can use this voucher as many times as you like up to midnight on June 30.
padraig.floyd@ft.com
Pensions Management
June 2010
Definitive guide
This authoritative work is a definitive guide to UK pensions law and practice. It deals with the duties and responsibilities of key personnel and the law applicable to specific tasks, such as contracting out, early leavers, reconstruction, winding up, fund and surplus.
This practical handbook will guide the reader through the complex web of pensions related statutes, regulations and case law, providing accessible, easy to understand explanations.
The ninth edition takes full account of the extensive changes to the pensions law regime, including implementation of the Pensions Act 2008 and Finance Act 2009.
4/5 stars
Pensions World
June 2010
First, a declaration of interest; this book is written by members of the pensions law team at Nabarros, a team which recruited one of the leading lights at my own law firm a little while back. So it is rather annoying to report that this one-volume study, despite the inevitable hype by the publishers and the law firm itself, is very good indeed.
First it is quite an achievement to have described in quite some detail the whole corpus of pensions law in under 1000 pages. It s objective is clearly to be comprehensive, and it achieves that end with some success. It cannot have been an easy task; it is (and now is a relatively quiet period) raining pensions law and the incessant downpour makes it hard to present a coherent and current picture of the UK pensions system. The sheer size of the book (it is around three times the size of the original edition) shows of course how dysfunctional our pensions code is. There are a mere 16 chapters, covering rather unevenly the basic system of pension provision in the UK, and a description of the players involved (lawyers, accountants, investments managers and others) and of course of trust law and trustees. There are the usual technical chapters on contracting-out and preservation (which with some exceptions are now rather disregarded in practice as they decline in importance) and then chapters on day-to-day issues such as insolvency, employment issues, divorce, discrimination and investment.
Inevitably it concentrates on the issues arising out of defined benefit schemes, especially as they die from the application of too much loving from the regulatory system. The chapter on funding spends inevitably (and perhaps hopefully) a great deal of space on surpluses (maybe Nabarro knows something the rest of us don’t), there is a valuable chapter on reconstruction and winding-up, a chapter on personal pensions and personal accounts, which will annoy the NEST Corporation which considers personal accounts to be an occupational scheme (and which shows how fast things are changing), and a basic chapter on mergers and acquisitions.
Bringing up the rear are chapters on pensions disputes (including a valuable summary of alternative ways of resolving disputes) and a huge chapter on taxation, which shows as only a study like this can, the absurdity of the HMRC simplification exercise of 2004-2006.
The book suffers from a slight lack of focus; it is not quite sure whether it is targeted at the expert (using it as a vade mecum) or at the beginner – but whatever its target, it is useful for both. Disappointingly, like some others works from the same publisher, the work suffers from a lack of confidence. The authors should be comfortable enough, coming from the stable they do, to express their own views on interpretation of the material they describe. The value of the work is in presenting a story to the practitioner, from where they can move to the original texts if they need to, which are now much more readily available electronically than they used to be. Simply reciting black letter law in one book is now less valuable than a chapter explaining how the law looks in perspective, and what some of the tricks of the trade might be. This book sometimes and understandably steers a rather unsteady course between the two objectives, but anyone needing an overview of a particular subject or issue will find this carefully constructed and meticulous survey an essential first visit. Indeed even those who are involved daily in pensions law work can find it useful and helpful to step back from time to time from the trees to order to inspect the wood.
Criticisms? There are a few drawbacks, but they are perhaps hard to avoid in trying to draw a balance between reciting the code, and making it understandable. There are perhaps too many legalisms in the text (‘reference is made to . . .’; sentences starting with a statutory reference and others infelicities which are the products of inexperienced and trained writers; inconsistencies in the person (sometimes using the passive, sometimes using ‘we’)). The compliance regime is spread around in the relevant chapters rather than dealt with separately. There is excessive respect and too little criticism of the authorities and the judiciary, so that lacunae, faults and errors both of law and policy are glossed over. It might have been more practical for the publishers to use a bible paper to make the book smaller and lighter to carry around – and give it a hardback to make it longer lasting. And the excessive use of italics in the statutory references is a house-style typesetting tic that is hugely irritating. There is only passing reference to the issues increasingly being posed by defined contribution arrangements, both trust-based and contract-based.
But any criticism must be muted in the light of the astonishing erudition and industry employed in this compendium. It is as up-to-date as any book could possibly be while the legislators might be taking a perverse pleasure in changing the scenery as it is being painted. It is a woeful testament both to the truly awful state of pensions law in the country, and to the way in which a talented team of pensions lawyers can try to rise above the problem. This is a useful, accurate, sensible and comprehensive outline statement of pensions law which will be used on a day-to-day basis by every practising pensions lawyer in Britain.
Robin Ellison
Pensions: An International Journal, 2010
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