A quick post, seeing as there is a lot on currently.

I often talk about The Pluto Problem.  When I was at school, Pluto was a planet and everyone knew it.  There were 9 planets in the solar system.  And then a few years ago we were told it wasn’t a planet but a dwarf planet.    So the Pluto Problem is the issue  of everyone agreeing what something is, until some authority some years declares otherwise.

This you can apply to whether an investment is a UCIS (or perhaps a close substitute) which is what makes Sipp operators nervous about a permitted investment list. Equally, it could apply to a property which looks like student halls, say, but HMRC decide later that it is residential.  Or to a large wind turbine which may turn out to be tangible moveable property.

And now perhaps The Pluto Problem will apply to UK commercial property when deciding whether it is a standard asset under the FCA’s capital adequacy rules.

So, being a fan of the TV show “The Big Bang Theory”, I have named this post in the same fashion as they name their episodes.

What we need in the SIPP industry is some Ronseal Rectification.  Rules that do exactly what they say on the tin and everyone knows where they stand.    In the meantime, if everyone could agree how many planets there are in the solar system, it would be a start.

(As an aside, this weekend I went to Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh which is excellent, and there was a book in the gift shop called the 13 Planets …)