The situation for development of pensions today (April 18th) is expectant but not active. We await the publication of a Pension Bill by our Minister and his DWP, this is some time to come in the next month and while it won’t be definitive, it will be a good way to steering the future. The PLSA Edinburgh speech and the questions answered by Torsten Bell tell me that this will not be a retail Bill for the DC industry but a Collective Bill. What I mean by “collective” is that it will concentrated on changes instituted by “default” and measures that people will need to opt-out or be impacted by.

We know that this will not be a Bill to take on the question of “adequacy” by increasing contributions demanded of employers/employees into workplace pensions. It will no doubt complete work on improving value for money assessment on the saving of pension pots but the major job of VFM is likely to be extended so that people see pensions as a lifetime experience of saving and spending their savings.

Here is likely to be the most radical impact for the pensions industry and it is where I am putting my personal efforts as Chair of AgeWage. AgeWage means a wage in later age – and my job is to help the schemes I work with to be that more efficiently and more effectively. I do not mean extend the work of wealth managers to become mass market – this will not be financially viable for them or viable for ordinary people.

I mean instead that helping DC and DB schemes that want to help their members to convert DC pots to pensions , to do so. In recent blogs I have emphasised that DB plans can – though embracing the idea of Shared Ambition Schemes (the with-profits partially guaranteed type) and through CDC (the non-guaranteed and pension ambitious type).

I hope that the DWP are reading this and TPR, it is not my intention to be subversive but to publicise the thinking of many people who I work with. Most notably Edi Truell who has converted his super trust , pension super fund to a Shared Ambition Scheme backed by capital from his financing background.

But I also see work in this space from a DB scheme run by Peter Cameron-Brown to offer whole life pension saving and potentially DC conversion to pensions at retirement.

And most importantly for the country, I see signs that Nest wants to convert to a Shared Ambition Plan for 13m of us!

This is very much “before the storm”. Most of this year has been for me about helping Edi reposition himself to be financier and investment guru, he has brought in Ken Hogg to manage the delivery and he is working with my good friend Mark Johnson on doing that.

We will be working with good people in actuarial (Derek Benstead) , in communicating with working people (Terry Pullinger) and in good governance (Sam Ashraf of PI who is Pension Super Haven Trustee. Our intention is to help firms as diffuse as mentioned above to deliver to members of occupational pensions and (regulators willing) to those whose wealth is in SIPPs (and shouldn’t be).

This is very much the calm before the storm. My colleagues in AgeWage are reaching out to others we admire in delivering solutions in the third decade of the 20th Century. I include Sam Seaton and Richard Smith (formerly of Money Hub), my friends at Collegia, an AI driven workplace pension for new companies and my very good friends at Retirement Line which I regard as one of Britain’s best run consumer companies offering value for money.

As many will know, I have spent much of my time in the past six months in hospital (Kings, UCL and Princess Grace). I have two afflictions , one to the brain resulting from a bicycling crash and one to my bowels resulting from an expanding prostate, embolisms on my lungs and chronic haemorrhoids.  Please bear with me when you meet me, I often make mistakes with words and am distracted by pain.

However, I am not going to stop in my quest to change our view of pensions in the years to come. It is not enough that we consider pension planning as ending when we want our money (when we abandon each other to pension freedom). Nor is it enough that we abandon measurement of the value we are getting for the money we commit to our later days.

Of course we need to find new and better way to measure value as we see more of our money invested in private markets and start thinking of pensions as “whole life” and not something that stops when we retire!

I am excited that the calm we are in right now, will burst into a savage storm of change when the Pension Bill/Act are upon us. Hopefully I will be fully recovered by then and you will still be reading my blogs- thank you.