Torsten Bell – Pension Minister

Speaking to a friend after the PA Conference yesterday I asked him how he found the Pension Minister’s speech earlier in the day. The reply was typical of my friends from the north west of England, it was blunt and from the heart.

“I have not taken a disliking of someone as quickly as I did Torsten Bell this morning”.

That was this plain speaking man’s verdict , on his first listening to our Pensions Minister.

I like Torsten Bell but can see my friend’s point of view. Yesterday he arrived, spoke for his allotted time, answered several questions , most in good political fashion and then pushed off. But it was hard to take the compliments he gave us seriously, as his cockiness ill-disguised the contempt he has for pensions and pension people.He was asked if he expected to be doing the pensions job as long as Webb and Opperman and he pretended to be humble saying that that was down to his bosses.

But no-one watching him could doubt that he does not see the trajectory of his career as down and out, the trajectory is up and now he has got the Pensions Bill over the light, the question is whether he can be bothered with the second half – the secondary legislation to fill the framework in.

Reasons ordinary people don’t think about pensions

He recognised the Pension Age and remarked that Pension Age was increasingly  a description of the British worker but also of what happens when you work in pensions. I felt aged working in pensions when this youngster poke fun at me and those around me – despite him being right! He had seven reasons for us to be perky (or cocky if you have a jaundiced view of Torsten).

We had the same homily for Britain’s resilience to the energy crisis, he talked oncer more about Labour Government’s commitment to renewable energy and its capacity to learn the lessons from previous crisis’. He reminded the audience that pensions are not on the nation’s mind, the cost of living is.

Seven reasons to be perky (about pensions)

Perky one; We have retirement. For the first time we expect to retire, the ordinary person will not work until he drops, The numbers of us getting to the state pension age and beyond is higher than it has been and retirement is a big change

Perky two; we’re over Thatcher’s damage to pensions; the pensioner poverty that returned in the 1990s was as a  result of the Thatcher determination to screw the state pension and individualise pensions. Thatcher’s damage has been undone since especially to the state pension which is now in better state.

Perky three; today’s workers will be tomorrow’s pensioners; Bell claimed that there have only been 2 years out of the last 100 when the rate of people out of work was lower than last year. The big change is women being in work, the growing worry is young people

Perky four; more of us will have a second pension;  auto-enrolment has been a success; this is still a reason to be perky

Perky five; pensions are in surplus and employers are no longer finding pensions a strain upon their cashflow. Deficits are rare in DB pensions, surpluses can be huge

Perky six; we are getting legislation with a purpose; encouraging productive investment , making the surpluses useful, improving the efficiency of LGPS, introducing guided retirement from DC, measuring DC with VFM, creating DC megafunds and allowing DB superfunds to get off the ground. Using what is fast becoming a cliche – he claimed the job was only half done.

Perky seven; we have another pension commission; this is an opportunity to scrap the endless reports on inclusion and adequacy and get something in place to tackle the problems, like the intractable problem of the self-employed’s pensions

What followed in questions was true to Torsten Bell’s reputation.

I asked the first question and will separately blog on  what I’m finding on CDC. My question was what can the pension minister say to an employer who is being pressurised by unions who say the workplace can increase by up to 60% by moving to CDC.  Bell was flustered, gabbled a bit and then finished by saying that employers should listen to worker representatives.

He was asked whether unfunded public pensions should be funded and he retorted to the question “do you want Government to pay more?” He pointed to statistics showing that the cost of public pensions was falling not rising,

The mighty Con Keating asked him whether the £3.5bn Bank of England pension scheme would start investing some of the money it has in defensive assets for growth in the economy in line with the Mansion House accord. The Minister gabbled something about morons trying to hold up the passing of the Bill with “lots of crap”. Con Keating got no answer but that financing growth is “a piece of piss” compared with getting infrastructure in place (an answer I got from the CIO of the PPF at the end of the conference.

Finally he was asked questions about benefits which he brushed away by saying that benefit payments are “totally flat” and that the questioner had been listening to more “nonsense”. People have been given too much incentive to prove they are ill.

At this point he admitted to being new to politics and that with this last question he’d broken the political rule and answered the question. He need not have reminded us of this “rule” as we’d had 20 minutes of answers that hardly addressed the questions.

I do like Torsten Bell’s speeches even though most people think he’s arrogant, cocky – choose your derogatory description. But he’s right. At a time when the Government is under pressure, we have seven reasons to be perky about pensions and I am happy to have captured what he said, even if I get some backlash from my Tory readers!

Thanks to Pension Age