Cooper becomes Pensions Secretary

The new DWP secretary Yvette Cooper

The appointment of Yvette Cooper makes her the ninth Secretary of State for Work and Pensions since Labour was elected in 1997.

Eight people have also held the more junior position of Pensions Minister.

Taken together, it means the new pairing of Ms Cooper with her more junior minister makes them the 15th ministerial duo responsible for pensions.

Dynamic duo

Yvette Cooper - one half of the Cabinet's first married couple with children schools secretary Ed Balls - first joined the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the January 2008 mini-reshuffle prompted by Peter Hain's resignation.

A Scottish-born former Independent journalist, she became MP for Pontefract and Castleford in 1997 after stints as an economic researcher for Labour leader John Smith and adviser to US President Bill Clinton.

She has three young children and splits her time between the family homes in north London and West Yorkshire.

She had a rough ride in her former role as housing minister, where she had the job of launching the controversial Home Information Packs (HIPs) scheme.

Big programme

As Work and Pensions secretary, Ms Cooper oversees the largest single spending department in government.

She will lead the government's recently announced reforms to incapacity benefit, designed to reduce the number of people claiming benefit because of long-term illness.

She will also be in charge of plans to encourage more single parents to rejoin the workforce.

With unemployment now rising rapidly, these goals could become more challenging.

It will fall to Ms Cooper to announce any further government measures to help the unemployed.

And she will oversee the government's long-planned revamp of the pensions system which is midway through implementation.

But with a maximum of 12 months to go before there must be a general election, the new team at the top may spend most of their time treading water.

"That is as long as some of the previous ministers have had, but I'd be surprised if we saw any real change," said Steve Bee, of pensions company Scottish Life.

"We've seen ministers changed constantly, producing a blizzard of legislation and change, and the constant change of people at the top has had something to do with it," he added.

Changes

Since Lord Turner published the recommendations of his Pensions Commission in 2005, the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) has been busily laying the ground for a huge overhaul of the state pension system.

The Pensions Acts of 2007 and 2008 mean that:

• the state pension age will be gradually increased from 65 to 68, between 2024 to 2046, for both men and women.

• the number of years of national insurance contributions needed to get a full basic state pension will, from 2010, be reduced from 39 for women and 44 for men, to 30 years for both.

• a new top-up state pension saving system will be introduced for low and medium earners from 2010. Currently known as the personal accounts scheme, it will be aimed at people who cannot join a decent pension scheme run by their employer.

The present government also intends to link annual cost of living increases in the state pension to average earnings rather than prices.

But it has always hedged this a little, by saying it will be "subject to affordability and the fiscal position".

This should start by 2012, or by the end of the next Parliament at the latest.

The National Association of Pension Funds has previously calculated that since 1995, there have been 700 separate legislative changes affecting pensions in the UK.

"The primary job in terms of pensions will be working with the Personal Accounts Development Authority (PADA) to oversee the smooth development of the new funded pension scheme," says Tom McPhail, pensions expert at the independent financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown.

Taxing the rich

Only three years after the so-called "A-day" radically changed the rules surrounding private and company pensions, fresh upheavals now loom on the horizon.

Exactly how this will work in practice, nobody knows Steve Bee, Scottish Life

This year's Budget carried the surprising plan to tax high earners on their employers' pension contributions.

This idea is still subject to a formal consultation by the Treasury, which has yet to begin.

But the basic idea put forward by the chancellor, Alistair Darling was that from 2011, people earning more than £150,000 a year would, for the first time, suffer their employers contributions to their pensions being taxed as a benefit in kind.

"Exactly how this will work in practice, nobody knows," said Steve Bee.

The top team at the DWP might like to have an opinion.