Take a surf with Robin Ellison through the world wide web and discover pensions at the touch of a button
There is a lot of pensions law out there. There are plenty of books; increasingly however, electronics are adding a new approach to finding and interpreting the flood of new rules and regulations. For those who really cannot stand solicitors at any price, there is www.lawrights.co.uk - but there is not much about pensions there. Among the electronic services designed for pensions professionals are Tolley’s Pensions Law-Link (020 8686 9141) on CD-ROM and Perspective (020 7393 7500) which contains the only fully edited and hypertexted service updated daily on all pensions areas, and is really an intra-net rather than an inter-net service.
But odd bits of disorganised information are now available on the world wide web on the internet, and some of them are useful on occasion. The main trouble is that their updating is irregular, and they are not consistent in content and presentation, so they cannot replace a dedicated service. Nonetheless, they are useful for the odd nugget. The trawl below is offered subject to the usual caveats, especially the one that webmasters always change the name of their site just as they are published more widely. It also excludes the sites which are more shopping windows than providers of substantive information.
For legal information generally most researchers try the Legal Resources Pages on www.pavilion.co.uk/legal which gets you into most mainstream legal sites. For other pensions information...
Government publications are available at www.national-publishing.co.uk (a Stationery Office site); a similar route is www.open.gov.uk/index.htm which gets you into all the government sites. Press releases are slightly erratic; for example, some DSS releases are not on the DSS site but the COI site, also reachable through www.open.gov.
Forms relating to regulations are published at www.floor.ccta.gov.uk:8080/dagii/welcome.nsf.
DSS press releases and publications (only from the start of 1998) are available on www.dss.gov.uk; it also includes ministers’ speeches (mostly John Denham), but some press releases fall into a black hole and may be printed but not issued. But a few of the new discussion papers are available there, albeit in difficult to read format
EU pensions material is available on the DGXV website at www.europa.eu.int/comm/dg15 (Monti Green paper for example)
Acts of parliament are on www.hmso.gov.uk/acts and statutory instruments on www.hmso.gov.uk/stat. That includes all public general acts of parliament from 1996 and summaries of acts from 1987, and all local acts from 1997. They are unamended. SIs appear two weeks after publication and are listed by number, but can be searched. Bills are available at www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/pabills
Debates in parliament are available through the www.parliament.uk home page, and by clicking on the select committee site, it is possible to find, for example, the Social Security Select Committee’s transcripts of evidence in its inquiry into pensions and divorce in the 1997-8 session, as well as relevant reports.
Sweet and Maxwell have a what’s new page at www.smlawpub.co.uk/whatsnew
Also available is the Law Society Gazette on www.lawgazette.co.uk and the Law Society on www.lawsoc.org.uk
All England Reporter is at www.butterworths.co.uk/content/aller, but is a price: £3,000 to £7,500 a year.
Casetrack is an expensive alerting and tracking service costing around £5,000 a year which follows cases for every judgment listed; www.smithbernal.com
The Court Service provides judgments from the Court of Appeal Civil and Criminal Division, Queen’s Bench Division and Commercial Court and Chancery Division and Companies Court: www.open.gov.uk/courts/court/cs_home.htm. House of Lords decisions are at www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199697/ldjudgment. They are listed alphabetically since 1996. Employment tribunals will be available ‘soon’. Some pensions cases can be found on www.11-kbw.law.co.uk where the Chambers at 11 Kings Bench Walk have been involved! Australian cases are at www.austlii.edu.au, Canadian at www.droit.montreal.ca/doc/csc-scc/en/index (for Supreme Court judgments) and the USA on www.lcweb.loc.gov/global/judiciary. Court of Appeal decisions are available on www.smithbernal.com. The index to the Pensions Law Reports series is at www.incomesdata.co.uk.
Supreme Court decisions of the US on ERISA are at www.law.cornell.edu/topics/pensions as is most of the US legislation.
For the US generally, the finest site is www.ebri.org (Employee Benefit Research Institute). And it it useful to try www.pionline.com (the on-line service of Pensions and Investments, the main US periodical, which puts UK publications to shame. And it would be sensible to have a look at the distinguished work of the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania www.prc.wharton.upenn.edu/prc.
A useful site with local authority pensions information is http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/road/xoq83, but what a name; you’d never discover it on a trawl using the usual search engines.
A useful and comprehensive international site is www.labournet.org.uk and www.unicc.org/ilo for ILO materials.
Magazine websites are usually frugal with their information; they prefer you to buy their hard copy. Useful company sites include however:
Pensions in Practice can be found as part of the IDS Pensions Bulletin at www.incomesdata.co.uk
Recruitment: jobs can be found at www.pensionsworld.co.uk and other magazines offer a similar service
Abstracts of general articles from Pensions Bulletin can be found at www.incomesdata.co.uk
www.monitorpress.co.uk where there are details of Pensions Today, one of the better newsletters, and The Pension Scheme Trustee, which provides a little more than most trustees really need or wish to know.
Legal magazines include the New Law Journal on www.butterworths.co.uk/content/nlj and there is a Web Journal of Current law Issues on www.ncl.ac.uk/~nlawwww/
Details of personal pensions guidance can be found on the ABI site: www.abi.org.uk, as well as the regulators.
The widest most appropriate site for financial advisers is www.ifaonline.co.uk, which although designed for independent financial advisers, contains information useful for all interested in the technical side of pensions.
There is no shortage of press releases and technical information available from the trade and professional bodies:
The actuaries produce press releases galore on www.aca.org.uk (The Association of Consulting Actuaries) and www.actuaries.org.uk (for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries). The National Association of Pension Funds has a tyro site on www.NAPF.co.uk with some of its press releases and speeches, and the Association of British Insurers on www.abi.org.uk for press releases again. Australian actuaries are on www.actuaries.asn.au and Canadian ones on www.actuaries.ca, both more useful than the UK sites. A new site (untested) is www.gaaps.co.uk with cross references to other actuarial sites.
Financial Services Authority publishes some of its guidance on the internet: www.sib.co.uk and OPRA is on www.opra.gov.uk. OPAS is on www.opas.org.uk.
The Pensions Institute has odd abstracts of highly academic articles, mostly on economic aspects of pensions: www.econ.bbk.ac.uk/pi. In the United States, a vast publication programme is available on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.gray.nber.org) including such classics as ‘The Pay-as-you go Pensions System as a fertility insurance’ and ‘The value of children and immigrants in a pay as you go pension scheme’. Many of the papers are in abstract form only, and full copies must be ordered and paid for ($5 a paper plus $10 for postage).
You can find the way round many of these sites either through Pendragon, or through www.irseclipse.co.uk (which publishes Occupational Pensions)
Also highly useful is a sister company of Pendragon, which makes available astonishingly useful information already digested, from its own publications such as the Pensions Factbook (Gee Business Network www.gee.co.uk). There is a goldmine of pensions information and advice. It is not free.
A rather US biased site is www.financewise.com which gives access to other academic and trade sites such as the actuarial institutes and IFS.
Technical information and odd snippets can be found on http://www.watsonwyatt.com/homepage/eu/ organised by Watson Wyatt.
And for a truly eclectic trip through pensions, you could do worse than have a look at Finland. The Central Pension Security Institute, publishes vast texts in English and in Finnish, with reviews in English (for example International Comparative Statistics on Pension Provision) www.elaketurvakeskus.etk.fi, which also carries news summaries in English.
If you’ve come across any other intriguing or useful sites, I’d be delighted to hear of them, and will try to publish them here (with acknowledgments) every six months or so in this spot. Please drop me a line at Eversheds, Senator House, Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4JL or fax on 020-7919 4919 or for the less electronically challenged ellisor@eversheds.co.uk
Source: Pensions Law Handbook for Non Lawyers, free on request,
Tara Mahmud, 020-7919 4500
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