Tom McPhail – a very different professional trustee

The clock had passed 5pm last night when Tom and I sat down in a secret garden near Cannon Street to catch up. Tom is spending the next couple of days in his first day meetings as a Trustee of Aviva’s staff pension scheme and we talked about the different responsibilities he has taken on as he closes his fifth decade and hones in on a senior railcard.

You wouldn’t have thought “senior” applied, Tom has been through some pretty horrid accidents climbing every mountain and his attempt to bring electric cycling and scooting with Mr Norris senior did not work out, but Tom has turned the tough times round and put in a shift with the Laing Cat, his last retail fling.

He is now doing what I hope we can do together which is to help institutional people understand what retail customers (members of pension schemes) need from those who hold their money.

Tom at 59

Tom today is sporting a tousled hair do second only to Robert Peston, and  like Peston there is a serious tone to what he says with Peston wildness

There are new topics to discuss. GMP equalisation, running DB on, the challenges to DC trustees expected from the Pension Bill , now on the Pension Minister’s desk.

We talk about the future, about doing the PMI trustee accreditation this winter and widening trustee work in 2026. He sees Aviva as the test of his capacity to make a difference and is not so arrogant as to think he has what it takes.

I think this view of himself will allow him to take on new responsibilities while neither sacrificing his consumer values or underestimating the tasks of being both DB and DC trustee. He has to bridge the cap between the members and their fiduciaries, between fiduciary trustees and the sponsor, one of Britain’s great financial services behemoths.

We talk about my recent blogs, Tom is intrigued by my comments on the FCA’s Financial Lives Service. I am pleased he is reading my comments, he wants to read the FCA’s report on what is actually happening to those in workplace pensions and with the promise or receipt of pensions. Like me he sees the responsibility of pension schemes as primarily to pay regular income to those who do not have the time to engage with the complex issues that beset us.

We drink a cup of tea at a rickety table in a secret garden with the early evening beating down on us from the West and reflecting at us from the glass of City offices to the East. I remind him of Donne’s Riding Westward – 1613. There is a statue to the Dean of St Paul’s up the road

I remind him how Donne chastens himself for not following his soul that faces East (Christ and death) but is carried West (for fun). If you can read the writing beneath the statue above you will catch the drift, if you want to read the poem (from the poet beloved by Dylan) link here.

Although Tom and I laughed a lot, this was a serious conversation about our responsibilities to ordinary people to get them what they need from the pension system.

I am glad that Tom sees being a trustee as the next step forward. Though I know he will do much more than work for Aviva’s staff pension scheme, it is a great place to start and I hope stay over time.

It is a great pleasure to write this piece in gratitude to Tom for a lovely cup of tea after a long day for us both. I hope I have expressed some of the pleasure Tom brings to my and so many more people’s life. It is great to have him working still for pensions and we should be honoured that like Bob Riddaway and others, he puts a smile on our face!