Yesterday I reported on Richard Smith’s complaint that some life companies write about people either having DC pots or DB pensions, something which is not the case as the dashboard will reveal. We all have state pensions which will pay much more than many estimated retirement incomes from private DC pots or pensions.
But there is another type of pension millions are building up , provided for work paid for in the public sector. The administration of these pension schemes is managed by private companies such as Capita and for the most part goes unnoticed as pensions are paid without fuss and drama. There is no big decision to make beyond the payment of AVCs and whether to bring the onset of payments forward or delay payment.
Read the article below (which I only participated in because I was asked to by the Daily Mail and Money Mail) and you discover another world of pensions which does not get discussed at our conferences where funds drive thinking.
In summary, here is what has happened since Capita took over from MyCSP last December. Capita are failing where My CSP succeeded and I’m left gobsmacked that a successful service has found such problems so quickly.
My reaction to the case studies I was shown by Tanya Jefferies were…
- That ordinary people were being let down and could suffer long term financial damage
- That what is meant to be reward is turning out for many to be an at retirement nightmare
- That the impact on pensions elsewhere can only be bad.
Yesterday I published a report on the NAPF, PLSA and now Pensions UK and how it has evolved from its early days in the 1920s, to what it is today, 100 years later. It seems that along the way, we have moved ever further from the pensions paid without funds to a point where we have funds with no pensions, free as pots.
But our DC pots are nothing like the state pension or the pensions that Capita has been tasked to pay for those in the civil service. I suspect that the wish to simply get a pension (with some capital as a tax free sum) is all that you need satisfying in public defined benefit pensions , the state pension is even simpler. The story in the Daily Mail can be understood by anyone who has engaged with pensions.
My hope is that we can return (with the pension dashboard, guided retirement outcomes and CDC schemes) to a pension world that aspires to the simplicity of the public sector and the state pension. My hope is that we take notice of failures like the one posted by Tanya Jefferies. It reminds us of what people want (and don’t always get) from a lifetime of saving.
It is the payment of income as promised that we must focus on, anything less is considered “Meltdown”