It’s good to see someone else venting spleen at the pusillanimous retreat into consultation rather than action.
It is frustrating that Regulators think they can get away with it and even more frustrating that they do!
Two years ago, the DWP admitted that it had got it wrong on the transfer regulations that were blocking people combining their pension. Last year 16,500 people were referred to MaPS for red and amber flags thrown against their legitimate efforts to make sense of their pension affairs.
When asked, MaPS had to tell the Sun that most of the time they had no idea why amber flags had been thrown.
The latest development in the pension dashboard saga is the production of a non-binding timetable of staging dates for schemes and providers to make their data available. This is the result of 7 years of consultations, years when people have been unable to find their pensions.
This morning I will be talking with Margaret Snowdon about the capture of progress that has been achieved by pension scammers. The free flow of data to dashboards, the portability of “portable” personal pensions, even the implementation of cost disclosures , has been constipated by a terror among legislators that action could lead to unexpected consequences.
Such is the consultation constipation that the things that the Government see as central to their growth policy, the investment of pension funds into illiquid but productive finance, the consolidation of small pensions into big pensions offering better value for money and the empowerment of ordinary people to use private pensions for better retirement is being put at risk.
The risk of growth not happening cannot be allowed to take over the agenda. Margaret and I will be talking about how we can break free from this stomach cramping dilemma we find ourselves in and how we can defeat scamming by making things easier not harder to do.
A properly run pension system where information is freely available, pots full portable and where there are no artificial barriers to VFM is devoutly to be hoped for. But it can only be achieved where there is a mindset to get things done.
As Bim Afolami says – Government cannot be seen to be overseeing the quietest graveyard, that is no measure of success. Consultation constipation is a symptom of a failure of nerve which is currently gripping pension policy. It has not always been so, it need not always be so. Listen to Margaret and me this morning at 10.30 am (free link below).
Fear of unintended consequences = fear of headline-grabbing stories in the Daily Mail etc. Legislators have a risk appetite too, and it’s measured in VaR … Votes-at-Risk. Sadly for many of them this is more than sufficient to stop them doing the right thing.