New Chancellor Phillip Hammond is being urged the scrap the “incredibly complex and confusing” taper.

As the Autumn Statement looms, Ian Price, Divisional Director for Pensions and Consultancy at St. James’s Place, said he would abolish George Osborne’s tapered annual allowance if he had a chance.

He said: “The problem with the taper is that it’s an incredibly complex and confusing way to curb pension tax privileges at a time when the government itself is aiming for greater simplicity. Recently departed pensions minister Baroness Altmann branded the rule as “fiendishly complicated”, and her predecessor Steve Webb has even called it “absurd".

“The taper is far too complicated for most individuals to fully understand. It is especially tortuous for self-employed workers who typically don’t know their income until after the end of the tax year. Furthermore, most members of final salary schemes do not know how much, in monetary terms, is being added to their pension each year.

“Funding for retirement should be simple and straightforward, so St. James’s Place supports calls for the annual allowance taper to be abolished. An annual individual limit on pension contributions of £40,000, irrespective of income, is both fair and realistic.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at Hargreaves Lansdown, agreed on the taper.

He said: “Younger workers need more help saving for the long term, they also have the potential to benefit from decades of compound investment growth. We’d like to see the government abolish some of the disincentives to save which bedevil the older generations, such as the Lifetime Allowance and the Annual Allowance Taper, whilst also directing its pension incentives more effectively by weighting them towards younger workers.”

Andy James, Towry, said a reduction in the annual allowance to £20,000 would be much simpler to understand than tapered allowances for high earners.

He said: “The reduction in annual allowance could of course be quickly implemented. If this did come to pass the hope would be that the current highly complex tapering of the annual allowance for those with incomes in excess of £150,000 would disappear.

“Whatever happens, my main hope is that our new Chancellor looks to consult on any changes and resists the temptation to pull a rabbit out of the hat which leaves the industry chasing around trying to comply in a short time span. We have seen how this can cause issues with the scrapping of the secondary annuity market once it became clear that too few buyers would enter the market to ensure proper competition and thus fair pricing.”