I am impressed by the podcast productivity going on from the VFM team. They have been given an opportunity to interview people at the PMI and they give us their view on the Pension Investment Review. I’m not quite sure how much there is to come but four and a half hours was the figure quoted. We’ve had nearly two and the rest arrives next week.
Pension Management Institute (PMI)
Gareth Tancred , CEO of the PMI takes up around half of the June 6th Podcast and a very good advert he does for the PMI, if I was at a stage of life to jam my head open with pension technology, I’d be active at that organisation. I see it has put its Linked in Group back up which is good , because it’s an organisation that thrives on that kind of social media and Tancred has clearly got some flair and plenty of energy.
Pension Protection Fund
The second half of the June 6th Podcast is an interview with the PPF’s of Katie Jones (Chair) and Michele Ostermann CEO. I have some feedback from people at the PMI conference (I wasn’t there), the feedback was that the CEO was sounding a wee bit cocky in conversation with Ruston Smith and I have to say that was how she came across on the Podcast. The criticism is that the £32 bn in the PPF is money that belongs to people who are entitled to around £18bn of pensions due to be paid. The £14bn difference is surplus and despite the pain that pensions have put employers and members through as demands have led to failure, the members are still facing a 10% clip in benefits and employers with DB schemes continue to pay a levy.
The PPF is not in a good place to speak of leadership, what I heard on the podcast and my friends heard at the PMI conference. The PPF may become a consolidator for small and underfunded DB pension plans, but not just yet and the happy proximity of the PPF to HMRC in Croydon does not impress me very much. Nor am I impressed the claim of the PPF to be a platform from which business is dished out to superfunds. Let’s be clear, this is not what the PPF doing right now, there is only one superfund and the Roadmap set out by Government doesn’t suggest there will be more consolidators in the next three years.
It is good to see that the PPF will now be required to put data on the PPF and FAS into the searches of its members on the pension dashboard. About time!
So Katie and Michelle are better off speaking to the VFM Podcast than to me and the Pension PlayPen because you would not get quite such an easy time!
Government thinking
The VFM team do a good job explaining the politics of the Pension Investment Review but I wish we had some comment on the Pension Schemes Bill instead.
The good thing of a “once a week” podcast is that you know it’s coming and can prepare yourself, the problem with one-off sessions is that they need advertisement for people to be aware of. Important as the Treasury’s excellent paper is, it will probably be remembered for confirming mandation.
Reading the Roadmap (easy), the Bill (hard) and the Impact Assessment (long but brilliant) is a lot tougher and I hope the VFM team will give us their views on that!
