People’s Pensions ads on Princes Street, they were speakers at three of the sessions I went to yesterday. A big Conference for them

The journey to Scotland has been hard for many coming from the West. The fire by Glasgow station meant for many cancellations and for those using trains (perhaps for ecological reasons) few escaped delays. I was one of the few travelling in a standard coach with Nico Aspinall a few seats away. It may take longer in the train but it did not stop meetings and attending a Pension PlayPen coffee morning with Oliver Morley.

It was a day when the position of CEO of PPF was in the news and Oliver Morley has along with Lawrence Churchill another voice outside the tent who once was ther.

The PPF representative I talked to in Edinburgh knew only a day and a bit before the public did of Michelle’s departure and of Richard Beavan’s interim promotion.

Compare this departure with the elegant transfer of Emma Douglas from Aviva Exec and Chair of Pensions UK  – to become Chair of TPR and you have quite a contrast.

So what of the Conference?

Emma did indeed commence proceedings and after her prolonged stay in position it was something of a victory lap for her.Her introduction spoke of a change in pensions but LCP had run a fringe event featuring their part in the transfer of Stagecoach’s Pension Scheme to sponsorship of Aberdeen leaving the bus company without liabilities for guaranteed pensions.

What followed in the opening afternoon was a number of panels. The first of these  discussed”Investment strategies in turbulent times” which brought together Dan Mikulskis , with Joe McDonnell and Mark Goswig.  Dan gave us  the private sector’s pension  future as master trusts while the latter represented  Border to Coast (an LGPS pool) and Railpen (a partially open DB master trust)

It set the tone of the afternoon. I hope that as the Conference moves on , we will see the future as less a bifurcation between a DB past and a DC future with the council tax payer guaranteeing LGPS in the middle!

I sense there has been a movement in the private sector, perhaps initiated by Royal Mail several years again but now taken up by unions and some progressive employers towards a middle way called CDC. That this might be occurring was not reflected in the opening panel nor in the two following panels I attended.

I had thought that a panel discussion between the FCA, TPR and Dan’s number two (Phil Butler) on measuring “value” might give us an opportunity to look at DC as a pension. Indeed Joey Patel kicked off saying that TPR has changed from thinking of DC’s outcome as a pot, to thinking of it as a pension. This gave hope that the VFM would move us on from the fiasco that the VFM Framework has become.

Unfortunately we did not follow Tom McPhail and my questions as to why VFM did not consider Value in terms of pensions people get (whether from DC or CDC). The audience, protected from the noise of the Exhibition behind them by wearing headphones, seemed mildly to think that people would find things improved by the Framework, but it has long ago been decided that VFM will be for Government first, large employers last and savers at the end of the long tail of distribution. I know all three of the panellists can do better than this if given the opportunity to speak their minds, but all seemed constrained by the constraints of their employment.

Two down and two  left to go. Having been collared by TPR for an interview,  I missed Aberdeen’s discussion on DC investment, another panel which included Aegon and Mercer.

But I got to see as a finale, a discussion of the value that pensions could get by partnering with ~Government using the British Business Bank and National Wealth, focused by the Office for Investment. Each department was represented by a man so we only had Mercer’s Tess Page to bring some variety in gender and in tone.

Sadly, the participants seemed to be stuck in a world of LGPS pools and what remains of open DB (Railways and USS got mentioned). I thought this a little sad and commented from the floor that this Conference has been billed as a seeing the future of pensions being quite different, as Joey of TPR – a future of pensions not pots and I thought this would give the bankers a chance to discuss the longer time horizons that pensions would return to as a result.

The idea of default retirement funds such as that announced by Nest and those proposed ty the DWP for UMES CDC did not get mentioned. It is hardly surprising that only a third of the £15bn that sits on the shelf of the Government bank has been drawn down. There seems little comprehension by bankers of who gets served by pensions (PS they haven’t all retired)!

So , as I left to find accommodation provided by my friend John Hamilton. I felt a little flat. This was a Conference that failed to kick off , at least as a debate. I can see that much fund is being had in the Exhibition hall by those selling their wares but this is a serious discussion of how we can (to use Torsten Bell’s phrase)  GET REAL.

Today we have two speeches – one by our Pension Minister, the other by the opposition’s Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions- Helen Whately.

In between we have a lot more panels , including WTW talking about Retirement CDC as the next big step. Oddly there is no one talking about whole of life (UMES) CDC which is here and will be launching next year.  This suggests to me an absence of discussion which makes no sense.

So expect to have me in fighting mood when you read tomorrow’s blog. Tuesday’s sessions  suggest that the new is struggling to break free from the past!