This conversation is Parliament’s General Committee’s with the CEO of the PPI (Curry is on dashboards too) and William Wright the MD of New Financial. It followed a discussion about private markets with Michelle Ostermann (Canadian) of the PPF. The politicians wondered why Britain was so far behind Canada and other countries, were so undeveloped in investment.
Chris pointed out that there hasn’t yet been scale in workplace pensions to get sophisticated investment into them. They haven’t had the capacity to get the people to do the deals or the money to count with those in the private markets.
William is a journalist at heart though now a thought leader for investment in capital markets. Arguing that private sector DC markets needs a reset he referred to the comments of Ostermann, Wright argues that Britain has got itself into a bad place because of the de-risking of DB and the arrival of DC as an investment in public indexes.
There is a weakness in argument in the middle of this session when Wright argues that the breakdown of pension’s wish to invest , was down to the Maxwell scandal. DB Pensions don’t invest for growth because of scandal but because their ambition is to shut down as quick as possible by employers and regulators who want to see an “end-game”.
Investment is being brought back into pensions as part of the value for money debate (woefully undiscussed in a 15 minute session). What VFM means to ordinary people is better pensions – not a tussle between fund managers. Unfortunately a debate about why we have not been investing as Canada and Australia do today is more political than important to the Pension Schemes Bill and ends in a dead end.
William Wright
Chris is asked to speak about whether he thinks dashboard development has anything to teach Government in enacting the Pension Schemes Bill . He does his usually heroic job with an impossible question. Five years may be the timeframe to get the Act fulfilled but it’s taken 10 years already to get the dashboards ready and all the conversation on change comes down to the question of time.
Although the line-up is a little obscure, putting two leaders of quite diverse think-tanks together is interesting as it allows the Committee to reference other sessions. But inevitably the loudest voices in Government are those who talk about finance and Wright steals the debate with the politicians.
But in terms of giving people what they want, Curry is the more important. Most consumers of financial services targeted at the long-term want to learn when they are going to get a way to find lost pots, find out what they are getting and get a road map to a good retirement.
For all the discussion of investment mandation that has dominated much of the day , the voters are consumers of financial services who want to know they are getting Value for Money, rather than supporters of the investment community in the City.
Chris Curry
