Reassure has over the years been the dumping ground for some of Britain’s worst unit-linked pension schemes. Back in the day I used to sell policies for General Portfolio. If you had or have one of these , these are the entities that led to you now being a ReAssure customer

In short, your money is now with ReAssure, a part of Phoenix and it is watched over by ReAssure’s Independent Governance Committee, chaired by David Hare.

I give this as an example and though the vast majority of the attention of today’s pension industry is focussed on a few master trusts and other workplace plans, the savings of those who invested in the early and mid 1980s are now maturing and should be paying people of my age a wage in retirement.

People like me may have sold you it, but David Hare is now the nearest thing you have to the person I was paid commission to, to protect you over a lifetime of saving. The brokers who fed General Portfolio are long gone, only a handful of those people selling those policies are still working and I know many of them. You may well feel aggrieved but if it were not for ReAssure, things would be a lot worse. That is the message of the ReAssure IGC and why David Hare has no choice but to see Value for Money as a forward looking measure.

To put it bluntly, measured over the past 40+ years, the returns for most ReAssure policyholders  cannot be described as value for money. They reach retirement with a pot denuded of value by high charges which – for all of ReAssure IGC’s efforts – had done their worst prior to their acquisition by Phoenix.

The ReAssure IGC report

ReAssure is important for what it calls “heritage pensions” like General Portfolio’s but it most important for people who bought Legal & General personal pensions prior to L&G becoming a major workplace pension provider benefiting from the inflows from auto-enrolment.

Before the 380,000 policyholders who were L&G customers transferred to ReAssure, L&G had promised they would be moved out of an annuity based lifestyle fund

If they had stayed in that fund, they would have suffered severe financial damage as the value of 15 year gilts plummeted in 2022 when the LDI crisis hit. I have looked at successive IGC reports and written to L&G to discover if the members got out of this fund.

But there is no reference to the fund in the ReAssure report.  I will continue to ask about whether L&G members were exposed to this fund in 2022 till I get an answer.

L&G policyholders can feel aggrieved not to be serviced by L&G and there are plenty of them complaining on the web. I fear that many of them feel there is no accountability for their experience. What might make sense for General Portfolio policyholders, needn’t make sense for those of L&G.

Is this a good report?

Much of the investment report is cut and pasted from the Phoenix IGC Chair statement and the report is long and confusing. I cannot honestly say I got a clear idea of whether value for money is improving so I am rating it an orange for its VFM assessment. I do get the impression that the IGC is doing what it can for the policyholders and the report is well written.

I give it a green for its readability and a green for the IGC’s effectiveness. This is the final report from David Hare – we wish him well and hope that his keyboard skills post Christmas improve still further.