“Some overwhelming question”

Open Government = Open submissions

The Pensions Investment Review team has sent me AgeWage and Pension PlayPen’s  submission to its review and I’m happy to share it here. In the past HM Treasury have got arsey with me sharing publicly private submissions but I think that if you are saying it to Government , then Government should be open about what you are saying. With getting on for 20,000 pension professionals in our linked in group and something like 200,000 reads a month of this blog, the idea of long term funding of pensions is regaining some ground. In this blog you can read what the AgeWage and PPP submission, This is not the Pension SuperHaven submission.

The AgeWage and Pension PlayPen submission

Here is what the Government has sent me, you can download it and use the words and ideas yourself. You only have until 25th September, so get on with it!

It would be easy to moan about the failure of nerve that led to the decline in pension provision and the rise of workplace savings. But there is no point re-harrowing that field, it will not make it fertile again.

We need to look to the future and not the past, 80% of us want whole of life pensions , the Government should be pleased with this. Whether delivered as CDC or Defined Benefit, scheme pensions extend the investable duration enabling patient capital to do its work.s The pensions of the future will be sponsored by big Government , local government, quasi government (USS et al)  and through capital backing from the secondary banking sector (may Pension SuperHaven be the first of many).

So long as pensions are perceived as private wealth, the chances for collective investment will be limited. The conditions for long-term investment depend on a collective rather than an individual approach. Collectively, the challengers of liquidity, of market shocks and of economies of scale can be surmounted.

Necessarily we need an opt-out for those who want self-determination on their money, but everything we have learned over the past 12 years suggests that when presented with the choice of opting-out or staying in, people prefer to stay in pensions.

Pension Investment is only one part of the reform and Government might have started its pensions review differently. But that is of no matter.  The 12 questions of the pensions investment review, roll to some overwhelming question “when do we get the pension from our workplace pension?” The answer from the pension investment review is “when we see pensions as long term investments rather than an end-game“.

As Pound said of vanity “here all is in the diffidence that faltered”

Eliot posed the question through J Alfred Prufrock…