I have been embedded in the pensions arena since I left college 40 years ago and joined Scottish Widows in their Final Salary Pension department in Southampton. I set up Kent Soper in 1986 and corporate and individual pension planning remains the cornerstone of my business today.The pensions arena has been transformed unrecognisably over the last 30 years with DC schemes replacing Final Salary schemes and Personal Pensions and SIPPs now dominant. The launch of the new pension freedoms allowing individuals to cash-in their pension plans from age 55 was a complete surprise and for me this liberation could prove to be a step too far. The freedoms present excellent opportunities for income, tax and succession planning for those with larger pension pots but the early stats suggest many small, medium and some larger pension pots totalling over £1 billion have now been encashed. This is a concern and may result is some future social issues such as a less efficient workforce, increase in retiree poverty or a large increase in State benefits which could take a generation to resolve.I understand the key reason behind the pension freedoms - to remove the compulsion of annuity purchase - as even today the majority of those buying annuities even though many fewer are still not shopping around for the best deal. A better option than full encashment at age 55 may have been to phase-in the freedoms, allowing more of the pension pot to be cashed-in over time with an increase in the minimum encashment age to 60.A real and practical help would have been to enforce the pension providers to allow the tax free lump sum to be withdrawn from an existing pension plan, leaving the remaining fund to accumulate until a later date. As there is no compulsion on the pension providers to allow this, many individuals have no option but to transfer their pension pots elsewhere in order to access their cash - something that takes time and can be costly.