The PLSA app kept up with you as you went along!

The final day of a conference tends to be an anti-climax after a boozy night before. This was an exception with two big sessions at the end, the first considering fiduciary responsibilities in investment – featuring Kings Bench superstar Nigel Giffin and the second focussing on value for money from Toby Nangle.

This is not to minimise sessions on the PLSA’s retirement living standards and how they can be used within LGPS or another on Governance at Scale, but these played second fiddle.

I am very sorry that I couldn’t attend the administration session early in the morning, no more than idleness on my part! I have written on Toby Nangle elsewhere on this blog 

As an outsider, I feel able to offer a different perspective on the LGPS. It is more important to the nation than it gives itself credit for and attacks on it by Reform are understandable and ridiculous in equal measure. If Reform could have the vision to see that LGPS is the example that could drag the nonsense of workplace pensions towards something better, then it would start having the look of a party with an economic policy. What it has right now is a failure to think things through.

I suspect that the problem for LGPS is that it is a little afraid of risk and unwilling to embrace  a message of growth because it has no need to. But success that it is, it could be more and pressure from Government to rationalise pools, invest more heavily in the UK economy and learn from other countries (such as Canada) is hard.

On the three key challenges – funding , investment and administration, I see Governance under threat not from without but from within. By within I mean a terror of what seems complexity but which can be simplified in the way that Reeves has done. It is interesting that no mention has been made to my hearing, at the Conference to the Department of the Government that is supposed to be looking after LGPS. That is because LGPS is now a major political piece in the game the Government is playing.

It is surprising and a little disappointing that national press stayed away from this Conference. The Guardian were supposed to be hear but there was no sign of them, the FT were not here as reporters , nor many of the trade press. This I think diminishes both the Conference and the LGPS.

It is important for the PLSA to get this Conference right and I think generally they did. The venue is a bizarre look back to the last century which worked for the Conference Centre but not for accommodation which suffered in the heat and did not offer value for money.

The most important success for the PLSA is that it keeps this going as there is no doubt that underrated as it is, the LGPS is hugely important to the success of this Government’s push for British growth and better standards of living for those who pay council tax (eg everyone one way or another!).

It is of course most important to those who are and will get pensions from the £400bn fund and I think it could and should be doing more for members, not by increasing the accrual but by making the most of features it has introduced, this includes 50/50 for those who are hard up and the use of the joiner’s capacity to swap DC pots from elsewhere for LGPS pots here.

LGPS is not separate from Britain’s pension landscape. It is to our DB system what Nest is to our workplace pension system, an example that can lead the way or draw up the bridge, depending on how it chooses to go.

I see Nest at the moment – stretching its muscles and I hope that LGPS will too, both are examples of funded pensions, set up by Government for people who see their pension as “state”, even if it isn’t. The relationship with the private sector is altering, there appeared more officers of LGPS relative to people selling to them, the trade hall had gone and it was the better for that. It was no longer a trade show.

I have said in the title of this piece that though the Conference has concluded, I will not. I have progressed my thinking by talking to people I will remember- the Carmarthen front row, the Lincolnshire rock force and the Surrey free thinkers are just examples of what I will take away. I do hope that the many who have read this blog on the Conference enjoyed the experience as much as I have writing it!

This picture captures the joy I and others had!