It was a joy to host a meeting yesterday of some 60 colleagues with a common interest in meeting the needs of ordinary people who want a pension from their workplace pension.

We heard for openers from Guy Opperman and Union veteran Terry Pullinger on the need for a “wage for life” solution for postal workers and how this is being satisfied by CDC. We heard about Pension SuperHaven , an innovation allowing savers to transfer into a DB pension to get a wage for life and we heard from Margaret Snowdon, who above all others has campaigned for consumer protection against those who would rather take our pensions than pay them.

We heard about investment, the role of capital in buffering these promises and finally we heard from former BOE Chief Economist Andy Haldane on the need to put pensions to work for the good of the country and its citizens.

These are pretty well the themes of this blog and though I am constrained from discussing the regulatory aspects, I believe this meeting will move the cause of pensions on.

As one former chair of the PPF put it “your problem is that your idea is too good”. The truth of this is that we have a regulatory landscape that incentivised the payment of pension over annuities and a consumer duty that requires people get what is best for them. In this world where different ways of turning pot to pension compete, it is a problem that some ways are more efficient than others. But it is a nice problem to have – so long as competition follows.

Following the meeting , I spent several hours getting up to  and returning from White Hart Lane so I could watch Tottenham Hotspur beat Quarabag 3-0. It was raining and the trains packed up. I had to take busses , bikes and considerable legwork to travel a few miles home as along with 50,000 other fans  we had to make the best of it.

The resilience of people means that no one moaned, they just walked and where they could , took a Lime bike. It was moving watching so many people trudging in the rain , because the train system couldn’t cope. It seemed an apt metaphor from the state of our private pension system. We will make our way home somehow, but it is not the journey we were promised of paid for. We need to invest in our pension infrastructure as we need to invest in our travel infrastructure, neither work very well – especially when it’s raining.

Meanwhile my paper application to withdraw some money from my DC pension is “lost in the post”. I have no confidence that it will be received by my administrators, like many others in drawdown I am digitally in the dark.

We need to make the taking of a pension a pleasurable experience, it is what we save for.

To all those who attended yesterday, thank you. We will keep on investing and I hope we will make the journeys of millions a little easier. Outside the trains don’t run on time