We are hosting a discussion with I hope an audience ranging from bosses who decide on pensions to consultants who advise them – with a few like me who quite “fancy a little more as a pension”. We will meet online at 10.30 this morning and our thinking will be led by two people whose thinking I respect a lot.

One is Adrian Boulding, who many will know. Adrian abandoned much that he was doing to focus on the promotion of CDC and is a Director of the group that hosted the launch last Wednesday. The other is Chris Bunford, an actuary who worked with LCP in getting pricing right for 700 employers who might be going into CDC under the umbrella of the Church of England.

I will be hosting and asking some pertinent questions of my own about why employers aren’t being put at the centre of this debate. I hope that there will be employers in our group asking the same thing.

If this turns you on and you want to listen and/or join in the discussion then please join us at 10.30 am (Tuesday 28th October). Here’s the link

Join at 10.30 here.

One of the figures who has yet to emerge from the DWP’s document is the Proprietor of a multi-employer CDC scheme. The proprietor sounds like the mogul who ran a national newspaper!

The proprietor of a CDC scheme is a single, central body responsible for the commercial activities and business strategy of a multi-employer scheme. This proprietor is separate from the scheme’s trustees, who are responsible for ensuring the scheme is run properly and members’ benefits are secure. The proprietor’s role is to handle business decisions while trustees focus on governance and member interests.

Could the proprietor of a multi-employer be a participating employer or group of them? Could they take back control of pensions for the people employed?  Could the employer make this part of the business?

I say this because I met a few employers last Wednesday when CDC was launched and I hear that there is a lot of enthusiasm for CDC around the country for a kind of pension scheme that pays more pension without putting the employer more at risk than the defined contributions entered into.

I can also see the capacity of many pension managers and the people they manage to ensure that a pension scheme is launched and run within the rules laid down by the DWP and regulated by the Pensions Regulator – BY THEM.

So Adrian, Chris and I will pose the question this morning – can employers use this skill base they employ already to manage the multi-employer schemes the Government has in mind?

Could we see employers putting up the capital to make these schemes work, in return for equity in the proprietor. Can employers be proprietors of CDC schemes?

I say this because I hear of no obvious alternatives that are not one way or another conflicted. The consultants and insurers who are heavily involved in the accumulation of money to pay pensions may want to involve themselves in “Retirement CDC” which comes as part II of the CDC endeavour, but there is nothing in the Government’s consultation response to the UMES proposals that prohibits this.

Strip away the lengthy words and you get to a very simple concept, a workplace pension that pays a benefit that is defined but not guaranteed. The definition is that every contribution will pay value for money when the saver retires, and that the pension benefit is the most that can be paid following the best endeavours of the Proprietor and the Trustees.

There are no guarantees, just the best endeavours of those involved. That is all that ordinary people expect.

So let’s hope that we get a good turn out this morning and that we can debate whether CDC can be useful for employers as a means of paying deferred pay as pensions but as potentially “good business”.

I’d like to plant ideas in our audience’s minds that there can be skin in the game for the employers who want to run CDC as proprietors and that rather than having another debate about what CDC is, we can discuss how it can help get pensions to deliver more than DC can. That will involve some collective thinker and collective discussions like the Pension PlayPen this morning can be part of that.

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