This video may be useful to those who are wishing to sign the Pension PlayPen’s Open Letter to the Pension Commission II. A quick ring round the playmates I’m in contact with suggests that few will sign up till they have seen it.

We have been deemed to be elderly moaners. The Commissioners are elderly but have yet to moan, perhaps we have an example to follow!

The letter will come from what is being discussed on today’s debate and recorded on this video. So give it your attention if you are considering signing up.

Of course there is a bias in this group that I have remarked on before. We are old and we are male and we are known by Government as being moaners!

Be your own judge on whether the moaning is justified but the big phrase on this video is
“go big”. Go big starts out with  Tom McPhail, Tom took over because Andy Agethangelou was travelling, Bryn was in Spain so Tom stood up as step-in chair. There were two Tom “go bigs” , the first a proposed raise of the state pension age to 75 and the second a move to put unfunded state pensions onto CDC.

There had been an agenda prior to the speech

• The triple lock; it has been hugely beneficial in improving the value of the state pension but it can’t go on and the political parties are trapped in a game of electoral chicken where no one can be the first to admit they’d change it. It needs a commission to give them..someone…anyone the air cover to make changes

• Pension tax relief. Same story; politically very difficult but it is an archaic system that makes very little sense in a post auto-enrolment world and it costs £70 billion a year. Anyone remember MIRAS?

• Public sector pensions. Now too far out of kilter with private sector pensions and also costing the government £50 billion a year; they are the cause of the most egregious inequality in our whole pension system. Others may disagree…

• The regulatory architecture of pensions. It makes no sense to have two different regulators, employing thousand and costing millions, both regulating defined contribution pensions. Should they be merged?

• Is 2027 too late?

• Self employed need help now !!

• Pension certainty in retirement (SELFIEs maybe)

It will be interesting if this gets into the Pension PlayPen submission. I am Chair of the organisation but have stood down (not up). This is not my agenda!

I am not for this kind of thing unless we have something to respond to.  The terms of reference are too vague, the Lah Lah comments of the Pension Minister about commissions and the urgency of the Pension Schemes Bill make the Submission a waste of time to reply to.

It will be difficult to get signatories to this submission unless the points in the letter are encouraging “go big” without too much detail, there are a lot of Pension Playmates over 75 but an awful lot of us yet to retire who know many like us for whom the state pension is the  primary income stream when work cuts out.

I stood down because I find there are more important things for us to be considering, namely increasing the value for money of the pensions we wish to have in years ahead.

I suspect the Pensions Minister, who is off helping the Treasury with its budget (as reported by the New Statesman) will leave the running of this Commission to the Commissioners, I suspect he will have elevated himself in the political stratosphere by the time it is published with the suggestions being someone else’s to deal with. His contribution to pensions will be the Pension Schemes Act.

Will you be signing a submission to the Pension Commission? Watch the video above and decide!