Reeves should heed Aviva boss’s warning over pension tax cuts, says MAGGIE PAGANO

Amanda Blanc is a tough woman. Since joining Aviva four years ago, she has tidied up operations, cut jobs and given the insurer a new sense of purpose.

It worked: Aviva is the country’s largest pensions and insurance provider, serving 19 million customers with more than £300 billion in assets.

It is the number one in workplace pensions: 4.9 million Britons have more than one policy. Shares are also up by almost a third.

Blanc is also a senior figure in the corporate world: he is a non-executive of BP and was recently asked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to advise on a £7bn national wealth fund.

As demonstrated by the brutal resignation letter Blanc wrote when stepping down as chairman of Wales’s Professional Rugby Board last year after accusing members of misogyny, she is no shy violet either.

And she is a lady, which makes Blanc’s latest warning to Rachel Reeves that the Government should stay away from pension tax cuts all the more compelling.

And he was spot on. Speaking after reporting excellent half-year results, Blanc was responding to rumours that Reeves is considering changing pension exemptions to help plug the “£22bn black hole”.

Currently, basic rate taxpayers receive 20 per cent tax relief on pension contributions, while higher rate taxpayers get 40 per cent and additional rate taxpayers can claim 45 per cent.

There are plans to change to a flat rate of 30 percent, penalizing those with higher incomes.

Blanc rightly warns the government to think carefully, as pensions are a long-term game.

Anything Reeves does today, he warns, will have consequences five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now.

Blanc will no doubt have in mind Gordon Brown’s famous attack on dividends paid to pension funds, which meant retirees lost income.

Pensioners may have lost as much as £250bn, while the knock-on effect was that pension funds stopped buying British shares. These political and gimmicky changes have dangerous and unintended consequences.

Blanc could have gone even further and reminded Reeves that pensions are not just a matter of savings, but represent deferred income and are certainly not a lure to be plundered by desperate politicians.

We can only hope that when Blanc meets Reeves to discuss the new wealth fund, she will emphasise the damage that the change to pension relief, including the tax-free lump sum, will have on future pension incomes.

Reeves has made a big deal about having such important leaders as Blanc at his side.

It would be rude of you not to listen carefully to what experts like her have to say.

The Unipart method

Almost 11 years ago I stood in the pouring rain outside the former headquarters of British Leyland on the desolate Cowley industrial estate near Oxford, waiting to interview John Neill.

All I knew about Neill was that he had joined as a business graduate, had led the acquisition of Unipart in 1987, was quirky, had studied Japanese lean techniques at Honda to improve production processes, and had devised the “Unipart way” of doing business.

With a turnover of £1 billion, the car parts manufacturer was employee-owned and highly successful. All in all, it sounded intriguing. And so it was.

More than that, Neill is one of the UK’s great industrialists, albeit one most people have never heard of.

One of the many fascinating topics we discussed was how he wanted to apply his industrial techniques to reforming the NHS, which he argued was obsessed with top-down rather than bottom-up objectives.

He called it simply stupid, since 95 percent of what is done does not add value for the customer, something that is true in most organizations.

Here’s what he said: ‘I’m going to be frank with you, and this will upset a lot of people in the healthcare sector, but if we ran our factories to the same level of defects as your average hospital, then we’d be out of business within 24 hours.

“And we would be bankrupt if factories operated only five days a week, as many hospitals do.”

Now, after 50 years on the Unipart path, the 77-year-old legend is retiring.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting should ask her to join the NHS board.