There’s much chatter about how the taxation of pensions contributions is going to changed and so on.

Rachel Reeves will be urged to raid the pension savings of up to 6m middle-class workers in plans presented by Treasury officials ahead of her first Budget.

The Chancellor is expected to consider a proposal for a flat 30pc rate of pension tax relief – meaning that higher rate payers will pay an effective 10pc tax charge on their retirement contributions for the first time.

The plan would affect up to 6m higher and additional rate taxpayers, costing the wealthiest savers around £2,600.

Well, maybe, etc. We’d remind that it’s not actually pension tax relief it’s pension tax deferral. The pensions are taxed as income on their way out of the pot in those future golden years. So taxing money that goes in and also that that comes out is pretty obviously double taxation.

However, our real insistence here would be that whatever the rules then they’ve got to apply to everyone, equally. To civil service pensions for example. To NHS doctors’ pensions - to MPs’ pensions, obviously. And do so at reasonable calculations of the pension valuation too. None of this use of varying discount rates to prove that, acshully, that £80k a year civil service pension is only worth 2 pence as a capital sum. Similarly, if teacher pensions’ employer contributions are equivalent to 23% of salary (a figure we’ve seen somewhere or other) then that 23% gets taxed just like any other pension contribution. So too those of the higher levels of the civil service - obviously.

By analogy think of the rule of law. The definition of which is that it applies to all equally. Even Cabinet Ministers (even if ex-) can get 7 years’ pokey for lying about a hotel bill. The Permanent Secretary gets his pension and his pension contributions taxed in exactly the same way as the hotel receptionist.

Quite apart from anything else we tend to think this will improvethe advice Ministers receive on the subject.

Tim Worstall