Emma Douglas – Chair
Our new chair of The Pensions Regulator will be Emma Douglas.
I’ve been working with her since I was at Eagle Star selling corporate DC plans against here when she was at Threadneedle.
Both of us were under one owner – firstly BAT and then Zurich but we had different approaches to “defined contribution” both in how we represented our companies and in who we were successful with!
Threadneedle was in those days an institutional investment company housed in an insurance company, Eagle Star was an insurance company looking to break into the world that was opening up as defined benefit schemes started closing to future accrual.
Emma today is an institutional icon , speaking for the NAPF, PLSA and now Pensions UK as well as heading pensions at Aviva. I am very pleased that she is to become our regulatory chairperson. I suspect we know each other quite well by now!
She will be an able successor to Sarah Smart and taking on from the little known Kirsten Baker who has been interim Chair these past few months
But she is taking to the position a very different view of what is wrong with DC than that expressed by the Pension Minister. This headline is from Professional Pensions.
The problem for the Pensions Minister is that “DC” is about workplace savings but not about pensions. The future Chair of Pensions Regulator has been of a different view.
Indeed at one point the pensions trade organisation called itself the Pension and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) . It has pulled in its wobbly lip to “Pensions UK” but at its last conference in Manchester, Emma Douglas and her executive made it clear that the deficiency was not pensions but contributions. This led to ongoing badinage between Zoe Alexander of the Pensions UK and Torsten Bell, during and following his speech.
Reading the account of Emma Douglas comments (14 January) at a Work and Pensions Committee (WPC) pre-appointment meeting as the government’s “preferred candidate” for the role of chair at The Pensions Regulator (TPR),
Douglas raised concern around younger generations retiring with only DC savings.
She said while the Pension Commission is looking at adequacy, which is “absolutely the right thing to look at”, unless action is taken “we will have generations of pensioners that will be poorer than ones now and I worry about lost generations”.
She noted with DB schemes in a “better position now”, if she were to become chair at TPR she would look at making sure DB benefits are paid and how surplus is extracted in the “safest way possible” to ensure the “best protection for saver benefits”.
However, she highlighted her concern around the current environment noting she has “real concerns” about adequacy.
When pressed for what she saw as priorities she was explicit about what she thought TPR should be focussing on
Douglas added focus for TPR in the coming years will be on the value for money framework, ensuring the correct models are in place for governance and trusteeship, as well as tackling “egregious and horrible” pension scams, which she said are a “shocking worry for the industry”.
Thus far, Pensions UK and Aviva have been quiet about the rise of CDC as the means of increasing pensions for ordinary workers putting money by through payroll saving.
I hope that after 30 years working in the same space and for organisations with similar aims, I will be able to convince Emma of the Pension Minister’s view, that it is pensions and not just pension contributions that need to go up!
Employers (especially those with high numbers of low earning employees) have been hurt by increases in national insurance. I hope that we can find ways to help low earners with low pots to move to DC pension schemes, whether through default decumulation or wholesale migration to whole of life multi-employer (UMES) CDC schemes.
I very much hope that Emma can be won over to focus on pensions – not just saving!
Henry, I fully concur with your assessment, whilst wishing Emma every success in her new Role, I know how difficult it can be having spoken with Sarah Smart before and around her appointment and her vision at the time. TPR as an organisation could be compared to a super tanker, taking a long time to change direction or to set a new course.
Another insurer!?
Insurers are the most risk averse minded in the industry, and so have a natural inclination to derisk and tend not to understand or belief in investment and growth? The easy answer ( for their business model) is to increase contributions, with the immediate kick to assets under management. But that solution is akin to a tax hike, and costs jobs and hits GDP?
We need the industry to be rewarded and aligned to deliver better pensions and growth, not just to gather assets.