A nice place to eat near my flat in Blackfriars London
I had a pizza, Paul had a vegan pasta , we drank water and coffee.
Paul Todd is someone I can’t remember meeting. He remembers meeting me, a lot of my past is forgotten since I had my accident. I am glad to have met (again).
Paul is from Grimsby. This video is of a group of Grimsby’s local people visiting the investments made by their pension.
I came in touch with Paul because I was struck by the way he explained what he was doing to two video bloggers interested in what he was doing.
There is something about Nest that is very important to Britain, Nest is our state workplace pension.
It is an amazing achievement to have got where it is. It could , if it wanted, announce it has £50bn (which it has) but it is choosing not to. The value of a DC fund is not guaranteed to fall. Check out its performance with Chief Investment Officer , Elizabeth Fernando from this link.
What Paul and I talked about was not about performance but about the future. The average age of a Nest saver is 46, it is beginning to look like a pension scheme rather than a savings scheme and that means it must focus on its savers futures.
I am 63 and privilidged with a great education and over 40 years talking with people about their financial futures. The people who came out of school and college with me are now retiring and some have no decisions to take, they have pensions from the Government or are luckily in private company pension schemes which are giving them security from their investment.
But I know more people who have not had privilege, pension or otherwise and that is what Paul and I talked about for our 90 minute lunch. We talked about Nest savers (and I of others) who are not privileged, have not got investment advisers who help them with their financial planning. These people bought into Nest as a pension scheme and others who I know expect their workplace pensions to do what they expect their state pension to do.
It is quite easy for me to talk about abstract ideas like “Defined Benefit” and “Collective Defined Contribution” pensions as ways of paying people back their pensions over the lasted years of life. Paul reminded me of how things were back in the 197os and 1980s (when he was very little) but has spoken with those who set pension schemes up within companies.
There was no regulation of how the pension should be, schemes came with or without increases in pensions, with or without spouse and partner pensions, they did not even guarantee the benefit. We have build these ideas into pensions as “advantages” but we only had the choice to do so , because those who started these pensions believed that in the long-term, it was investment that would pay the “pension” bills for those who ran the schemes.
And as we spoke , my heart warmed to this man, a man I did not recognise when he came to the table but who I wanted to hug as he left for the train , I for my flat. We will not solve the future by demanding certainty, we need to have belief in the future like those people in the 1970s and 1980s.
Paul told me of the days in 2012 and 2013 when Nest couldn’t win any business. When schemes like Aldi stores, which they competed for, went elsewhere. They were hugely happy to get to £1m and then a little later £1bn and now they are round and about £50bn.
They have had no disaster, they may have had a couple of issues with administrative software but there has been no disaster. 13m people are now relying on Nest and it sets the standard for workplace pensions, it has shown that the auto-enrolment pension system works. I swore at them when they wouldn’t play ball with Pension Sync in 2014 , I moaned at their early days investment strategy but they have proved themselves durable.
For over 1m employers, Nest is the Government’s pension and Nest is a great advertisement for the auto-enrolment workplace pension system. Everyone else, including People’s, Legal and General and Lifesight (all of whom have more than is needed to meet the Government’s “scale” measure), can be confident in investing as Nest has pioneered. I hope that during the course of 2025, Nest will make us more proud as they start turning from savings scheme into pension.
We have every reason to be proud of Nest and of those schemes that follow them. But for small companies like AgeWage, Nest is the obvious place. Thanks to Paul Todd who I discovered (post accident) through his conversation with a couple of lads.
