The legislation governing self invested personal pensions (SIPPs) should be stripped down to its simplest form, says Suffolk Life's John Moret, on the twentieth anniversary of the Joint Office Memorandum 101 (Memo 101).

Memo 101, which for ten years was the only guidance available on the investments that could be held within a SIPP, was introduced seven months after the introduction of SIPPs in the 1989 Budget. John Moret, marketing director at Suffolk Life, explained: "It was a great example of what pension simplification could have achieved. The permitted investments were covered in just eighty words in one short paragraph and the whole regime was effectively detailed in just two and a half pages. Contrast that with the recent anti-forestalling legislation which runs to over a hundred pages."

Moret likened the layers of legislation that have been added to pensions over the years to the layers of skin on an onion, adding that the situation is now getting so complex that it is beginning to make "eyes water". And he told Pensions Age that the frequent and fragmented changes that are made to the rules surrounding pensions smacks of "fiddling while Rome burns".

"The legislative complexity really started in 2001 when the Inland Revenue changed the approved regime. "That was the start of the paper mountain and it continues to grow at an alarming rate."

He added that is he was to be on the BBC television programme Room 101, the only item he would simplify would be the whole pensions legislation landscape, which has been estimated to exceed 50,000 pages.

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