I cannot understand who a value for money assessment is for if it is not for the regulator.

Who takes choices on the provider of workplace pensions if no choice needs to be made? The vast majority of choices were taken by accountants who simply point employers towards providers who work with their payroll. This is how NOW became a leading provider (it certainly wasn’t for anything else). The HMRC choice is a GPP called Collegia who have the best part of 5,000 small employers working with them to fund employee’s retirement. Nest has 14bn workers with money.

To suppose the reality of saving is going to be determined by a four-shade rating flies in the face of reality. Workplace pension saving is determined by regulators and providers -by payroll!

What will matter to workplace pension providers is what they are made to do by the Pension Regulator and the FCA (see above). This is not a consumer rating unless it touches ordinary people at the point when they are taking decisions on what to do with money they have built up for retirement.

If I was rating credit or owned the equity of a workplace pension provider, I would be paying attention to the ratings as they could have a serious impact on a firm’s profitability and in extreme solvency. But there is little that will be done for the saver who is on the wrong end of poor investment, incompetent service or undisclosed charges.

Torsten Bell has made it clear that people will be made aware of the performance of their provider and we can be sure that the press will do what they can to make it clear to people whether they have got lucky or not. But that is the end of it. There is nothing in the value for money consultation that makes me feel that I would be rewarded if my provider was marked “red”.

All that we as consumers are getting is a heads up when we pay attention to our pensions , of what has happened. When I started Pension PlayPen in 2013 , it was with the aim of employers having a certificate signed by an actuary saying that they had a decision having conducted due diligence. Only around 17,000 employers got that far and I doubt that many of those certificates (digital or printed) are sitting on a file.

The truth is that the vast majority of decision making was taken with no due diligence on the provider and just with the assurance of regulation. There were a few rogues early on, but not many. Nimble young providers such as Smart took over workplace pension systems that were no good and (as far as we know) there are no scandals in workplaces where money has gone astray.

What we are left with is a retrospective view of what happened to our money which will become available at about the time our pension values are delivered on a pension dashboard.  It will not take a miracle of technology to allow the information from the dashboard to be linked to the VFM dashboard assessment and for savers to see retrospectively what Pension PlayPen wanted to show on a forward basis.

Below is an example of a rating we did in our early days (2013). The harsh reality is that how your workplace pension has grown in the thirteen years since bears no relation to the predictions me and my friends at First Actuarial doing the research made. Our top performer (NOW:pensions) turned out to under-perform though there will be those in new owners who will argue that that could be different on a “forward” basis. The great successes, People’s , Nest and L&G who are all “sized” satisfactorily to keep going , were all quoting then and they have been joined at the top table by Willis Towers Watson’s LifeSight.

But I have to admit defeat. Despite running Pension PlayPen throughout the enrolment period (2013-18), we could never catch the nation’s imagination. We were told that Value for Money would only become important when there was money on the table.

Well now there is. Now most people who are older than 55 (when you can still take your money)  People will be looking at there various pension pots from differing employers and working out which will be good for them, which less so.

Here the VFM ratings will be used. The re-organisation of providers resulting from VFM tables is likely to see further transfers to the workplace pensions that survive and a level of engagement from consumers we have not seen before.

Even so, the vast majority of decisions will be taken by our regulators and by providers , their trustees and their IGCs will have some influence.

Nostalgia