I opened this article yesterday and my eyes glazed over! This all sounded very technical and daunting to a person not expert in actuarial valuations.

But a few hours later I got this from my postman. He was delighted to know he was going to get richer from an increased payment from a scheme paying him a tax free cash sum and a letter telling him he’d get a pay rise of 6.4%

He was so pleased he’d googled to get more news, at first he got the calculator , the pen and a lot of graphs with which I started this article. Then he got something that made a lot more sense.

And then the  former postman sent me this (to my phone) which he’d picked up from Emma Simon on Corporate Adviser

The postie asked me for my thoughts as he’d read those of Helen Draper and Steven Taylor of LCP (all this arrived in one go on my phone). I said it meant he’d be getting  hefty pay rise and that he should be proud because he’d made it easy for other bosses to set up CDC schemes for their staff.

I told him that Royal Mail had done something very brave and opened the door for others. That was not pub talk. Pub talk was to tell his former colleagues they were getting nearly six and a half percent pay rise in their pension pay and those yet to take their cash could expect to see more seven and a half percent more as a cash sum when they took their pension pay.

He was pleased. I hope that the Trade Unions, who are meeting today to talk about pensions will want to get more employers following Royal Mail as Helen and Steven think they will.

And I hope that they will talk of pensions as pay and increases as pay rises, because that is how my postie talks and that’s how we have to explain CDC to the millions of people who’ll be getting a CDC pension in years to come.

I can’t go to the TUC pension but I’ll be following it on my phone like my postie friends. I think that unions are critical to the spread of CDC and will do more for people’s pensions than can be done with calculators and graphs.

Torsten Bell – pension minister is on at 10am.