Chancellor Philip Hammond did not mimic the tricks of his predecessor George Osborne, by unveiling any dramatic pension policies, when delivering his first Autumn Statement today, as he confirmed the government will be consulting on banning pensions cold calling.

Delivering his first – and last – Autumn Statement, chancellor Sir Philip Hammond confirmed a prior commitment to ban cold calling in the pensions industry.

Reacting to the news, AJ Bell senior analyst Tom Selby warned: “The pensions cold-calling ban is a great intervention in the battle against scammers and we are looking forward to seeing the detail of the consultation before Christmas."

While Selby believes that this is the beginning of a positive initiative, “more can be done and the cold calling ban must be viewed as the start of a long-term drive to defeat pension fraudsters and not the final solution,” he claimed.

Just Retirement’s group communications director Stephen Lowe agreed: “While this is a step in the right direction, more needs to be done to support people as they make choices around their later life finances.”

Selby suggested that “radical solutions” are necessary to tackle the growing threat of pension scams. He noted that savers could be given early access to their tax-free cash allowance when they “demonstrate financial hardship”.

Furthermore, former Pensions Minister Steve Webb also welcomed the cold calling ban but highlighted that it “needs to be introduced swiftly” and be implemented on a number of forms of communication that scammers may target.

“It needs to include unsolicited texts and emails as well as phone calls, and must cover a broad range of pension and investment cold-calling. The consultation must be followed by swift action,” Webb said.

Moreover, while the introduction of the pension freedoms last year has awarded savers greater freedom with their finances and so making them somewhat more vulnerable to scammers, “the decision to make pension cold calling a criminal offence is long overdue,” stated Barnett Waddingham senior consultant Malcolm McLean.

Less optimistically, however, McLean emphasised that “The government’s plan, whilst welcome is unlikely to put a stop to this pernicious type of fraud altogether, for example in relation to unsolicited emails or calls from abroad.”

While policing cold calls is a challenge in itself, many industry experts highlighted the need to pass on some responsibility through education, to savers themselves to be able to spot scams.

Nonetheless, while the ban has been hugely applauded, there is the simple fact that scammers do not follow the law, and so, the cold calling ban may not actually make as big of an impact on pensions fraud as anticipated.

Spence and Partners director and president of the society of pension professionals Hugh Nolan explained: "We very much welcome the continued efforts to protect people from unwelcome cold calls, but more importantly from pension scams.

“Unfortunately, we are not sure that a ban on cold calling would be effective as there is an obvious risk that the scammers will simply ignore it, since by definition they aren't exactly law abiding citizens."

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