I remember speaking on my boat with a senior civil servant who worked for Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in the Treasury. “Sunak does detail , Truss doesn’t” was her blunt assessment. It is actually quite easy to work with bosses like Sunak while bosses like Johnson and Truss are hard to work for but better leaders. While Truss could have been a better leader if she hadn’t become deranged by power, Johnson certainly was a better leader of the country than Sunak could be. Sunak lacks the emotional intelligence to lead.
Which explains how he missed the big picture on Thursday, choosing to try and win an argument about tax rather than stand proud for those on whose shoulders we stand. Even if he was advised to speak to ITV rather than attend the D-Day memorial service, he took that advice and my suspicion is that he had neither advice or conviction, just an obsession to win the detailed argument on tax, he had already lost.
It really doesn’t matter if Sunak stands down at this late stage, his team are already so deep in the relegation zone that Sunak is yesterday’s man whether he remains in charge or resigns. Labour have had several more charismatic leaders than Kier Starmer but he is decent enough and he did spend the day in Normandy – whether out of conviction or just an empathic understanding of how the nation feels about the sacrifice on which the post-was peace was built.
The foundations for the 2019 election victory that seemed so sure at the time, now look weak. The most telling question on the 7 party debate last (Friday) night was why nothing seems to have got done over the past five years. We know from our pension world just how terrible the DWP and Treasury have been in enacting the numerous good ideas they inherited from previous Governments.
But the pension dashboard, CDC, the change in the state pension age, superfunds, sorting small pots, the 2017 AE reforms – none of this has got done. This despite cross-party support for change. Those things that have got done (sorting the net pay anomaly for instance) have been done behind the scenes, without the headlines and by people who saw social justice as more important than grandstanding.
But it is hard to say that about the implementation of any of the grand designs. Instead of a strong democratically accountable top-down Government, power has been delegated to regulators and in particular to the Pensions Regulator. TPR has – through a series of codes, created such detailed guidance for those operating pensions that nothing changes. We have no dashboard, no CDC scheme , no DB funding code and only two scheme have consolidated into a superfund, both but a bridge to buy-out. Consolidation has slowed to a crawl, the VFM initiative is all but forgotten, innovation dare not poke its head above the parapet for fear of regulatory warnings.
We have huge amounts of unused regulation, consultations and calls for evidence but nothing has got done. Successive Pension Ministers have told us how much they are doing but nothing has got done. We have analysed the risks to death but none have been taken.
So , for all the grandstanding , culminating in the recent TV debates, neither Rishi Sunak or Kier Starmer have had anything to say about one of the key worries of an ageing population, how we finance our retirement, especially the later stages, where cognitive and physical health declines.
I will link the failure of Sunak and the Conservative party to create a national pension debate to its failure to link with the nation’s mood over D-Day. Despite its natural appeal to the older voter, the Conservative party does not get older people or the problems younger people have with getting old. So just as Sunak ducked D-day, so he has ducked retirement and getting old.
The harsh conclusion is that the leadership of this Government has lacked any sense of direction with regards the pressing questions of growing old. They consider they lost the 2017 majority by addressing long-term care and they have completely failed to capitalise on the three great successes of the early coalition years, the maintenance of the triple lock, the successful implementation of auto-enrolment and the creation of a single state pension.
The consequence of handing over power to the Pension Regulator, failing to translate consultations into policy and failing to get the policy initiatives “done” is that the pensions industry has lost its mojo and has run out of puff. Like this Government, the PLSA and ABI are simply going through the motions, posturing at achievements that previous generations would have considered failures – the decommissioning of the DB pensions system being the most obvious example.
The word “pension” is now being replaced by “savings” and the concept of social insurance replaced by “wealth platforms”. We have undone so much great work in the name of “de-risking” but now find ourselves with a private pension system that is little more than a feeder for the wealth management industry, a DB system which is a feeder for the insurance buy-out.
Meanwhile, the vision of Trott, Sunak , Truss and Hunt for the nation’s growth to be kick-started by the Mansion House reforms remains alive (not completely undone). It is something for Rachel Reeves to build on. Even though the note in the Treasury drawer is likely to say (again) “it’s all been spent”, we should remain alive to the indomitable spirit of those , like the commentators on this blog, who think that things can only get better.