Tom and Jo are as one and this will have to replace this morning’s Pension PlayPen coffee morning as a debating point. (I apologise – we ran out of runway for one week)
If Britain thinks it is alone in having its pension funds pulled by the economic pressures its country faces, then it should read Mary McDougall on Denmark. This from 28th January.
The reality is that we are not self-sufficient, whether British , Danish or consider ourselves as European. We are dependent on America. There was a fine program last night on the relationship of the BBC with the Russian Government which concluded that however bad it might seem now, Russia’s political and economic climate will over decades return to what we consider clement. America will become less antagonistic and pensions have to take long term views.
For many years we have seen the great enemy to pensions in this country as the failure of the sponsor to keep a DB scheme out of the PPF. But commentators such as John Hamilton point to a much more difficult problem for those facing and in retirement
TPR sanctioned low dependency is the self sufficiency target – that along with increased hedging means you’ve covered the covenant issue. But what about inflation – the insidious and more dangerous risk to the value of any pension (rewind to Roy Goode’s seminal report 1993). That’s the fundamental duty of the Trustee – provide a pension that remains relevant with the cost of living? Trustees with a low dependency surplus are duty bound to consider if a low risk run on will let them provide better inflation protection.
In the space of a few hundred words I have worked through a variety of views of what a pension scheme is here for but for anyone who has not determined how their retirement will be financed, the future is various.
For those who are not dependent on the markets but taxation for payment of pensions (and that includes those dependent on the state pension and that plus unfunded public pensions) the Treasury is the only covenant that matters.
For most of us, dependent primarily on pots of money we have saved, there is the future of our work, our pay and the willingness of our employers to invest in pensions for our later lives.
For our largest DC pots (the biggest two of which are now close to £100bn in assets held- Nest/Peoples) , to suppose they are immune from being stretched by the various causes that the Danes and British quoted in this article, is wrong.
I would expect pensions to remain open and to enjoy the collective scheme’s “open scheme sweet spot”. This is beautifully explained by Derek Benstead’s diagram.
(TAS 300 should be a historic document of the fate of our DB schemes).
The only time that a Pension Scheme fails is when it closes and we are beginning to see how easily we accepted that failure. Now we ponder the future pension and how it recaptures the open scheme sweet spot!
But our future pensions cannot do all the things that we want them to do, if we simply shift money into passive global equity funds that are lifestyled to annuities, that is a different type of failure which simply good enough for our fast maturing DC schemes. We need our retirement savings schemes to become pension schemes again and that is what this Pension Schemes Bill and the UMES CDC pension schemes should be about.
So my contribution this morning, when we should be having a 10.30 coffee morning is this blog, a reminder that pensions need to be all things to all of us, because we all aspire to retire on pensions one day!
