This will notably take the basic state pension above £10,000 per annum for the first time.
Jenkins said: “The industry will undoubtedly continue the debate about how we increase pension contributions to levels that will provide people with a more adequate retirement income.
“Indeed, the government has yet to legislate for the changes proposed in the 2017 review; lowering the entry age to 18 and removing the lower earnings limit.
“These are important changes that will make a big difference to the retirement savings of lower earners.”
Elsewhere, Jenkins said it was a a great time for Laura Trott, the new pensions minister, “to take stock of the many ways” in which the pensions agenda could move forward.
“The pensions dashboard will make its first appearance, as providers start to provide data to the service in the summer,” he said.
“This is easily dismissed as a minor addition to the pensions landscape but, more accurately, the dashboard heralds the start of a digital journey which will likely take us towards an open finance world.
“Even those people who don’t make use of it will likely benefit from the cleansing of data as it is digitised.”
Jenkins said social care reforms for England were also “once again kicked down the road” during 2022, both in terms of their design and at least some elements of how such changes would be funded.
“Perhaps 2023 will see some more activity in analysing what was proposed, with further design changes to deal with some of the barriers that still stood in their way,” he added.
A reflection of 2022
Jenkins told FTAdviser that 2022 was widely hoped to be the year that the world emerged from Covid.
While that was largely the case, few would have predicted the cost-of-living crisis that followed.
Many governments – including that of the UK – have found themselves “lurching from one major intervention” in the form of lockdowns and furlough schemes to another, this time to curb rising energy costs, he explained.
“The war in Ukraine is first and foremost a conflict that is causing pain and suffering, and fast leading to one of the worst humanitarian crises Europe has seen for decades,” he said.
“But it is also a major catalyst for rising prices, when considering the knock-on impacts for daily living around the world.”
Jenkins explained that the true economic impact of the support the government has had to provide here in the UK is still to be fully understood, but it’s clear that the country’s credit card bill is of growing concern.
Rising interest rates and inflation have a significant impact on households, but also on the cost of government debt, and those debt repayments are now equal to or greater than the cost of running many of the country’s major public services.
