The Pension Regulator’s CEO has written a blog which you can read here or you can read an edited version on Professional Pensions .

Alternatively, you can read this blog and ask yourselves if the CEO’s  looking forward to not being the recent but now former CEO of the CMA.

Here is the headline for Nausicaa Delfas

“2025 will be a year of decisive action from TPR, with genuine and open collaboration and a focus on long-term outcomes for savers over tick-box regulation.

“All this will ensure we meet our goals as a regulator: to protect, enhance and innovate.”

You can of course read what the CEO has written without a newspaper or a blog like mine, Make your own mind up as to what TPR is doing to convince us that it is part of the answer not the problem. In my view it is not in a position to change itself, it needs to be changed and that does not mean changing the CEO necessarily.

I went looking for comments on TPR by the Pensions Minister (using AI to search), here is the reply he makes to a question by John Hayes

for what purposes the Pensions Regulator has used artificial intelligence in the last 12 months

Torsten Bell: (reply to Hayes in full)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the heart of the Government’s plan to kickstart an era of economic growth, transform how we deliver public services, and boost living standards for working people across the country.

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has used artificial intelligence (AI) over the past 12 months to support its regulatory functions and decision-making to better protect savers.

To ensure AI is used responsibly and effectively, TPR has established an AI Accelerator Team and is exploring the creation of an AI Advisory Council. These initiatives aim to promote safe and ethical AI adoption both within TPR and across the
pensions industry.

Key areas where AI has been applied by TPR include detecting pension scams, monitoring market trends, predicting pension scheme health and managing website feedback

Another question made to a female Pensions Minister, suggests these questions have been awaiting answering some time and involves AE contribution rate increases. It gets the usual Government response that this is not the key consideration, the key consideration is to make the existing saving framework better for those who use it.

My reaction is that Government is not , as yet, playing its cards as regards pensions. We are told we can expect a Pensions Bill in April and I expect the DWP is working on it, working closely with the Treasury and I would like to think that TPR is a party to what is going on.

AI is at the heart of what we do these days in business and it should be what the TPR and DWP are using to realign pensions with a growth agenda for the country.

I think it is critical that the new Bill, with a new Pensions Minister to see it through the House is about growth and about pensions not about tick-box regulation.

To turn to Torsten Bell’s final point

monitoring market trends, predicting pension scheme health and managing website feedback

If we are to see “genuine and open collaboration” as Nausicaa Delfas says, we need to have a forum to discuss these matters openly. This forum must include people with a genuine allegiance to the Pension Regulator’s objectives and also a wish to see our country grower rather faster than the recent growth figures indicate.

I know that the Pensions Minister will be making an important speech, kicking off the PLSA conference in the second week of March. There are people who read and comment on this blog and elsewhere who are demonstrating more than an allegiance to the past 20 years of contraction. While workplace savings schemes have grown, pensions have shrunk.  It is good that the State Pension has grown over the period and it is good to see LGPS strong, but that is because LGPS has not been subject to the risk-reducing regime that persists in private DB plans.

We need growth so that we can continue to pay better state pensions, as good public unfunded pensions. But we must turn our attention to the private sector and to auto-enrolment into workplace pensions which has not developed as we hoped it would when we set out back in the early days of this century.

It is absolutely critical that we look again at what the master trusts are not doing, not paying pensions and not thinking of doing so. We need to look at the wasted opportunity to pay more to people than annuities do and to do so as the default way for people to get their savings paid to them as a retirement income.

I believe that is possible and that we have capital in our  system that could be used to establish standalone DB schemes since it will not be private economies who will set up the private pension system of the future. How to deploy waiting capital is a matter for financiers, politicians and for pension people is a matter to discuss, but more importantly it is time that the Pensions Regulator , DWP , Treasury to get on and do something about.

We too want 2025 to be a year of decisive action Torsten and Nausicaa. We do not need wholesale change, just a return to what we did so well, before pensions lock-down.