Therese Coffey resigning
I am surprised that a former DWP Secretary of State who played little part in pension policy when the Conservatives were in power is now loud in the upper house and on social media.
There is nothing in this that has not been covered by all right wing commentators on the backstop of investment mandate or the clumsiness of our pension regulation .
But where was this engagement when from 2019 to 2022 Therese was Secretary of State for the DWP. Her career effectively came to an end when she supported Liz Truss to be Prime Minister, she lost her seat in July 2024 and she is now safely tucked up in the House of Lords (see below).
She has a number of comments from those in opposition to the Pension Schemes Bill, complaining about what is being done (the threat of mandation on trustees who do not invest for growth in the UK) and complaints that the FCA and TPR are both involved.
There are complaints that opportunities for small commercial workplace pensions can continue beyond 2030 or 2035 and there are issues Therese Coffey has with the PPF and possibly pre-97 pensioners who get no increases to their pensions.
Happily I had forgotten about Therese Coffey and my question to myself when I saw this post was..
“Is Therese the SOS that Guy Opperman relied on as Pension Minister?”
No wonder so little of his agenda ever got to fulfillment. Under her time in charge of the DWP we did not get a dashboard , progress on superfund – or much progress on CDC.
What we got was a truly awful end to any hope of the resurrection of Defined Benefit private pensions when her political choice for Prime Minister blew up the economy through a budget that showed how little the Conservatives understood the financing of pensions,.
If pensions played any significant part in Conservative policy during the eight years after Steve Webb lost his seat in 2016, it was in permitting – even encouraging – the “de-risking” of DB pensions in such an appalling way from taking charge or Britain’s economic progress in 2010 till departing in 2024,
Con Keating and Iain Clacher had to point out to the work and pensions committee just what had happened in 2022. We all now know Liz Truss’ significant contribution to defined benefit private pensions and to the Conservative party was entirely destructive. Therese Coffey was Liz Truss’ Deputy Prime Minister when the Truss budget happened.
I cannot point the finger for this at Opperman, he was our first junior pension minister and he did not support Liz Truss. But Therese Coffey was his boss when she was a full cabinet minister and her rare excursions into his area (wrongful statements on pension credit) are best forgotten. She cannot be listened to as we listen to peers including Altmann, Bowles, Drake and Davies (to be joined by Pitt-Watson). Opperman was from 2017, the only person in the Conservative party interested in promoting pensions, if it hadn’t been for him I fear even more would have happened to AE workplace pensions than what followed the Osborne budget of 2014 and the “pension freedoms”. We are now having to put a Pension Schemes Bill to put right the mess those freedoms are causing.
There are many things that I’m sure Therese Coffey is expert at and a quick scan of her career on Wiki makes it clear she has had an eventful life. Pensions however is not an area for her to start on, that alarmingly is what she appears to be doing.
She finished her Governmental career at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. There is a message for her from this rural image!
Therese Coffey and the House of Lords
Therese Coffey was nominated for a life peerage by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in late 2024.[80][81] She was created Baroness Coffey, of Saxmundham in the County of Suffolk and of Grassendale in the City of Liverpool, on 17 January 2025,[82] and was introduced to the House of Lords on 21 January.[
Was Liz Trust the saviour of DB pensions?
Pre the Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget, the ‘deficit’ on DB schemes was estimated at somewhere between £500bn to £1trn on an asset base of something around £1.8 – £2trn. Today we’re told the surplus on a super cautious is circa £200 – £250bn on an asset base of £1.1trn. As an economy we’ve somehow lost assets in the range of £500 – £1trn, and at the same time eliminated deficit replacing it with surplus, all of a similar amount of displacement. Real magic money tree stuff!
The more important I wanted to make Henry is that the value of your blog is that is genuinely the only place where there is any debate on the purpose and value of pension and the linkage and need for growth (as well as Con/Iain clarion calls for reliable data). I’m not a fan or apologist for Truss Kwarteng or Coffey, but I am certainly not a fan of silencing sides of the (political) debate I may or may not agree with at a particular point in time.
All informed politicians konw we are raiding pension schemes of assets through conversion to gilts, and all know that is politically expedient in the short term, accepting and leaving the long term drag on growth. We all need to be part of the honest debate on this.