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The keys to ISA reform
 Christmas
came early for the members and staff of the PEP & ISA
Managers Association (PIMA) during our annual conference
in November. Ed Balls, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury,
chose this event to make his primary announcements on the
future
of PEPs & ISAs...
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2007: New faces for financial services across the pond
 Imagine
it’s Thursday 4 January, 2007. You are sitting atop
one of the many towering office blocks near Wall Street at
the helm of one of the US’s major financial corporations – and
gone are the Republican lawmakers who have been so supportive
to you throughout their tenure leading Congress...
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Is Britain really breaking down?
 The
Conservative Party’s report “Breakdown Britain”,
published in December, pinpoints indebtedness as one of five ‘pathways
to poverty’ in the UK today. This places debt alongside
family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence
and addiction. They quote a barrage of evidence to support
their central assertion that there is “excessive complacency
about the impact of debt, particularly for low-income households”...
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Skills for one and all?
 This
week the Conservative party policy review released an interim
report outlining the party’s position on skills. This
report follows the publication of the independent Leitch
Review of Skills, commissioned by the Chancellor, Gordon
Brown, and published in December 2006, and continues to promote
skills as the veritable mot du jour...
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The future of “New” Labour under Gordon Brown
 As
Parliament returns from the Christmas break, Gordon
Brown has signalled his intentions for his likely premiership
in a well publicised TV interview. Just last week, John Reid
had further fuelled speculation about his own Prime Ministerial
ambitions in his statement that the New Labour project must
continue beyond Tony Blair’s time in office. Now, Brown
has outlined a series of proposed departures from Blair’s
time in government as he looks to update Labour’s 1997
pledges for the challenges of 2007...
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Consumer issues and the Social Market Foundation
 In
my November article I considered whose fault it was that
so many borrowers are overstretched. It was a question that
I thought would be asked by MPs, who would be seeing a growing
number of cases in their constituency surgeries – particularly
after Christmas. It seemed clear to us at Cicero that a balance
that places adequate responsibility on the individual, while
also recognising that lenders have a role to play to ensure
that customers do not take on excessive credit, was the answer...
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