What do we mean by Pension Governance?
When we listen to a musical recording what we hear is the perfect balance between instruments achieved by expert mixing.
Pensions Governance does that mixing job for your workplace pension , making sure that what you get when you retire is delivered with the precision you’d expect from this guy.
It’s really important that we stop thinking of pensions governance as a “nice to have” . It is as essential to pensions as the Director of a Film or the Producer of a Record or the Chef who prepares your meal.
We have celebrity chefs, record producers and film directors but can you name one person who springs to mind when I say “pensions governance?”
This is a recent comment on a recent thread posted by a pensions actuary
I have been largely uninspired by the idea of master trusts and multi employer plans and I cannot really explain why. However this made me think. What is the difference between a multi-employer plans run by a group of faceless bureaucrats and being one of many GPP from a large insurer run by a group of faceless bureaucrats.
It seems to me that there is very little difference. The issue is that arrangements are not run in the interests of members. I don’t know what the answer is but if all contract based DC schemes were well run and cost efficient we wouldn’t be having this discussion
The guy’s got a great point. People know nothing about pensions governance because the people who manage our pension funds are faceless. Where is our Jamie Oliver, our George Martin , our Stanley Kubrick.
Granted – most of us would rather eat, listen to or watch a great meal, record or film but isn’t it time that someone who is in charge of pensions actually stood up and said
“here we are, this is what we do and this is why you should listen?”
What I mean by pensions governance is not just the minute attention to detail that makes for the perfect balance between all the tracks but the vision of those leading pensions that makes for greatness. There are pension leaders, Alan Pickering, Malcolm Mclean, Ros Altmann., Joanne Seagers all of whom have some bandwidth beyond the narrow circles of pensions folk. There is a younger generation including Tom McPhail and Margaret de Valois looking to popularise pensions rigorously and with modest good humour. We have two of the best MPs in the House of Commons as our Pension Minister and Shadow Pension Minister.
But much more importantly, we now have a pension system which inexorably involves every employer in the land and requires that at last almost everyone becomes a part of the Great British “save off”!
Margaret de Valois made her 2013 resolution to “get workplace pensions on Eastenders”. She’s no mug!
The business of pensions governance is not just about the management of pensions, it’s the business of making them acceptable to the pension’s public- all of us.
Which is why restoring confidence in pensions is right at the heart of what www.pensionplaypen.com is doing.
It’s time to give pensions a good name