This is the Video of one of Pension PlayPen’s best ever coffee mornings. Just check out the faces on this screenshot and you’ll get some feeling for what happened over 61 glorious minutes of excitement about CDC.

Here are five good reasons why I watched myself and 40 other people getting into CDC

1. They include great people talking – me, Chris Bunford, Adrian Boulding, Julian Barker and many more!
2. We’re talking about why it makes commercial sense for employers to get stuck into establishing  CDC for their staff over the next two years
3. It does not speak actuarialese or legalese – it speaks the language of ordinary people
4. It is funny and full of life
5. If you don’t watch it, you will be thinking CDC is boring, if you watch it – you won’t.

Many of us have been wanting CDC to happen for more than a decade and some a lot longer than that. We do see it as a 60% increase in pensions over a lifetime and a 30% improvement over an annuity if you start in retirement. Of course we can’t prove that, but it’s a strongly held belief and it is reinforced by every piece of work by each pension actuarial body.

But employers need more than just the promise of a better benefit for employees. They need to know they can have some cut in the skin, a chance to get rewarded for doing the right thing for staff. The Pension PlayPen believes in mutuality, of employers and employees being beneficiaries of involvement in CDC at outset.

This is why we are following up , less than a week after the launch last week, the reading of the whole of life rules in parliament last Thursday and before the deluge of actuarial and legal authorities take over.

If you like what you see here, you should get in touch with Pension PlayPen which will get you through to Chris Bunford, Steve Goddard and me and we will explain to you the work we are doing towards helping the DWP get the second consultation over with and a Retirement CDC product on the books in time for workplace pensions to use it as their “default decumulation” from 2027.

I’m leaving the best till last, we had a civil servant in Julian Barker on this web-call and towards the end you will hear him talk of Torsten Bell’s attitude to meeting the Pension Scheme’s Roadmap. (44 minutes; “gas in the tank” or “boot up the arse”) . The Roadmap says that defaults will be in place by 2027 and that CDC will be a decumulation option for workplace pensions – (currently DC – not a pension at all).

That means getting on with things. Five weeks from now till we have to get our consultation responses back to the DWP. If you haven’t got the consultation paper , you can download it here.

Julian Barker- DWP

Light emerging

Torsten – Pension Minister