I have now watched the ITV docu-drama and can understand that Paula Vennells found Alan Bates “annoying”.

I can understand now “annoying” it was to the Chair of Trustees of BSPS that 7000 of his members chose to transfer out of his scheme.

I can understand how annoying it is for the current BP executive to have former employees complaining that they aren’t getting the pensions they expected.

I do not conflate the various degrees of trauma of the three groups, but I do bracket them as getting their feet stuck in the “wet cement of institutional rigidity“. All action groups are annoying to management, in the old days, union reps were shipped from Tolpuddle to Australia.

The immunity bias

When you have reached the top tier of British corporate life, things happen to you that are designed to make your way forward smooth. You get executive assistants, not just a car but a chauffeur, your bonus is designed to pay out. This is what is expected of the job and it is argued that unless British executives were paid this much , they would go to America and get this much there, rather like companies do when they choose to list on the Nasdaq rather than the FTSE.

The permanence of power is imbued in the office – CEO, CFO , COO etc. Your job may not be for life, but while you hold it you are immune from the kind of criticism heaped on the executives of the Post Office , Tata and now BP.

High office does not immune you from responsibility, but that responsibility is the stuff of boardrooms and analyst meetings, not the pillory that is social media. The immunity bias means that those in high office consider criticism a threat rather than feedback.

BP pensioners are right to be engaged.

There are clearly good and bad ways to engage with your pension. If you are struggling to make head or tails of you DC workplace pension and what to do with it, you are advised to get more engaged, spend time with the Money and Pension Service, IFAs and websites set up to provide financial education. This kind of engagement is good as it de-risks the risks that people have been dumped with.

But there is another less pleasant type of engagement. It’s the engagement of the 80 year old Mum who has lost Dad and seems to have lost her state pension and needs to engage in why. There are many who will see her as a welfare scrounger. Not me.

She should take the £93.60 test and compare what is coming weekly to her account to make sure she gets a minimum of this amount. She should then engage – or get someone to help her – with LCP’s pension assessment website to see if she is one of the people who so far are due more than £500m in state pension compensation for underpayment. These would in years gone by have been regarded as “vexatious claims”. Thankfully, like deportation, “vexatious claims” are a thing of the past.

As regards the steelworkers who have been ripped off by the “Time to Choose” process that fed them to the lions, they are now fully engaged and furious , that having waited so long , they are getting zero redress – because interest rates are high. You go figure how someone whose mortgage has doubled, is told he won’t be compensated for his pension , for the reason his mortgage has doubled.  Try engaging with that.

And of course we have all seen how immune the senior executives of the Post Office and Fujitsu were to the problems of sub-postmasters.

But back to BP and immunity

People who benefit from defined benefit schemes are often referred to as “entitled”. Indeed they are, they are entitled to decent pensions for the work they put in and I’m glad they are. They are not entitled to discretionary benefits from their pension scheme but have a reasonable expectation they will be paid, if the scheme rules say that when a scheme is in surplus, extra payments may be paid. The extra payments were and are needed right now as the entitlement to pension increases is well below the rise in the cost of living.

Like the state pensioner , working things out on the LCP website, or the steelworker demanding proper redress of Alan Bates, the BP pensioners have engaged with their pension scheme rules and are now being “annoying” by pointing out that the actions of those who control the money they receive are not immune to criticism.

Like the DWP, BSPS and the Post Office, the executive of BP (and the other 1000 schemes that have discretionary payments included in scheme rules,), they are now being challenged as to how the surplus will be paid. Last year, it was rumoured that BP was in talks to buy-out its scheme with an insurer. This would mean that as much as 20% of its assets would be spent on securing pensions with a third party, rather than BP’s trustees paying them to pensioners. This 20% would certainly do for the pensioners.

Recent buy-outs and buy-ins, have been carried out with virtually no consultation with pension scheme members. Writing about the recently announced Boots buy-in, Neil Walsh of Prospect commented on this blog

The PDA [union] has only been recognised (for pharmacist and related jobs) by Boots since 2019 (after a very long and hard-fought process). I would be very surprised if they had any involvement in the process of appointing trustees (that wouldn’t typically be covered in a recognition agreement). In any case, even a union nominated trustee (where there are any) would be seriously restricted about what they could say about transactions like this. I would be surprised if the trade union knew anything about it (formally at least) until after it was announced.

The members have little or no way of getting heard either in the Boardroom or by the Trustees , unless their in public outcry. That is not because there aren’t mechanisms to feed through to these functions, but because of the immunity the executives and fiduciaries have to criticism. Indeed, when criticism comes their way, they express their annoyance by turning their back and finding legal arguments that justify what are injustices to common sense.

There are some well-heeled pensioners who get underpaid their state pension and there are some BP pensioners who don’t need the discretionary payment they should be getting, but we do not have means tested state or private pensions and the greater the need , the greater the speed trustees should be moving at.

I fear that BP is going at no speed at all on discretionary increases because it is in the most delicate of discussions about the future of the scheme itself. If my suspicion is correct, then BP should be required to say so and members should be consulted as to whether they consider the surplus should be spent on buy-out.

If this is not why BP find calls for discretionary payments “annoying”, then they should watch all episodes of Alan Bates vs the Post Office. They might be a little less annoyed after that.