The general levy consultation closes at midday on 8 September, and it proposes the steepest increases for master trusts and personal pension schemes rather than a flat rise across every category. HMRC has draft transitional rules out for comment on the minimum pension age. A barrister has been disbarred following findings that included recording family hearings without permission.
What is the DWP proposing for the general levy?
The DWP published its general levy review on 14 July 2026, running for eight weeks to midday on 8 September and covering the period from April 2027 to March 2030. The proposal replaces the flat 6.5% annual increase of the last three years with differentiated rises: 5% a year for defined benefit and hybrid schemes, 6.2% for defined contribution schemes excluding master trusts, and 9% for master trust and personal pension schemes. That last category is personal pension schemes as defined in the levy regulations, which is a broader thing than the group personal pensions some summaries have described.
The differentiation is the point rather than a drafting quirk, since the government is phasing DC, master trust and personal pension rates towards parity with DB to reflect where regulatory effort now concentrates. By 2029 to 2030 the department projects master trust revenue rising around 67%, personal pensions around 29%, DB around 12% and other DC around 3%. Levy debt reached £154m by March 2026, sits on the DWP balance sheet, and would exceed £260m by 2031 if rates stood still. Trustees weighing this alongside the surplus reforms we covered in our TPR roadmap roundup should note that the government response and secondary legislation are expected in early 2027.
Who is caught by the minimum pension age transition?
HMRC opened a technical consultation on 6 August 2026 covering draft regulations that would amend the Taxation of Pension Schemes (Transitional Provisions) Order 2006, and it closes at 11:59pm on 28 September 2026. The normal minimum pension age rises from 55 to 57 on 6 April 2028, which would otherwise strand members who did everything the old rules required and then waited.
Under the draft, members aged 55 or 56 on 5 April 2028 who had already become entitled to benefits, or had already taken steps to access them, would be treated as having reached 57 immediately before certain payments are made. Entitlement and taking steps operate as alternatives rather than as a single test, which matters because entitlement under the Finance Act 2004 carries a demanding meaning. The listed provisions cover certain pension income payments, stand-alone lump sums, pension commencement lump sums, pension commencement excess lump sums and trivial commutation lump sums, and they preserve access to later trivial commutation payments where a qualifying payment was made before the switchover. Uncrystallised funds pension lump sums are absent from that list, so a UFPLS paid on or after 6 April 2028 still needs a member who has actually reached 57. Our earlier pensions tax roundup covers the neighbouring threads. These are drafts and the shape could move.
Why did covert recordings lead to disbarment?
A disciplinary tribunal concluded on 11 August 2026 that Mariam El-Sobky, called to the Bar in March 2001, should be disbarred. Three cases were heard together and the sanction reflects the findings across all of them, so the recordings are one strand rather than the whole picture. Between March and December 2021, on at least three separate occasions, she made audio recordings of court hearings in family proceedings without the consent of the parties or the judge, knowing that she was not lawfully entitled to do so, and sent them to employees asking them to transcribe. The tribunal also found dishonest or misleading statements to the court, and a failure to keep client affairs confidential when appeal papers went to an employee’s personal email address without any confidentiality agreement in place. The findings remain subject to appeal.
Two rules sit underneath this and reach every practitioner. Section 9 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 makes it a contempt to use a recording device in court without the court’s permission, and family proceedings heard in private attract the further publication restrictions in section 12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960. The transcription step compounded the problem by putting private material in front of people with no standing in the proceedings, an issue that also runs through the recording-device ban we covered on 14 August.
What must connected pension schemes report from autumn?
The Pensions Dashboards Programme has confirmed, in its reporting standards consultation outcome, that directly connected organisations which have not yet implemented daily automated reporting will have to report manually from autumn 2026, with industry updates putting the start at October for September data. Manual reporting means submitting a subset of the existing reporting-standards data by file upload, at intervals still to be confirmed, and it sits on top of the existing duty to provide coverage data on request.
The harder date is the one that has attracted less attention: the programme proposes 30 November 2026 as the point by which every connected provider and scheme must have completed testing and be submitting data daily to MaPS inside the prescribed window. Respondents expressed mixed confidence that this is deliverable, and it falls one month after the 31 October 2026 connection deadline set by the Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 as amended. Schemes treating connection as the finish line have a second operational deadline four weeks behind it.