As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, our colleagues have been sharing some of their memories from their time at the PPF.
We’d love to hear your stories, memories and pictures too! Tag us and use the hashtag #PPF20 pic.twitter.com/TJyCl7eHmz
— Pension Protection Fund (@PPF) March 31, 2025
Some of us will consider the Pension Protection Fund a little boring, a little wanting the protection of levies from those schemes it is protecting. My friend John Hamilton describes the Pension Regulation over-protecting its PPF when it should be allowing it to do what teenagers do best – grow up! Now the PPF is 20 we will see a new PPF, behaving in an adult fashion and showing us what a DB scheme, open to new liabilities, is capable of. I mean more than paying pensions, I mean funding the country and its companies that will pay pensions independently of the PPF. The PPF is here to clean up the mess when pension schemes are forsaken by employers or force employers into administration.
There are some good people involved with the PPF today and I’m delighted to have sat at many of their feet, learning about pensions since 2005.
I know most of the people in the pictures and do them the honour of saying they knew and know more than I will. I am particularly happy to see the picture in the montage that sits at the top right. I wish that family well. The train links Brighton with East Croydon, that’s an easy journey without changes but it appears to be made in some old rolling stock. Is that a memory or a reminder that things need to be upgraded in time?
PPF should not solicit memories just from those who worked there or with them in Government agencies. It should be those who have been saved the fate of those in pension schemes that went phut before 2005. We should remember not just Steve Webb but Ros Altmann, both of whom did much to help PPF to be born and gestate. Politicians are easily forgotten for the good they do and remembered for the bad things.
I hope that people will look back on the 20 years of the PPF with the pleasure that those enjoying their PPF pensions should. People will complain they do not get the full promise but no-one gets a terrible deal and those with small pensions are best looked after. This is right, if the pain must fall, it must fall on those who are financially healthy.
I hope that we will look forward to the next 20 years with hope and expectation. Despite not going for growth, PPF has achieved growth and is £7bn in surplus. What it does with that surplus was hinted at by the Pension Minister in Edinburgh. But I can see a lot more it can do, as advocated by its senior actuary at the PLSA. The PPF is a very good consolidator.
The PPF has been good as a child and teenager and can do much more as it gets in its twenties.
