This is how things have gone recently, according to the FT

This is how things have changed in less than two years

We will have to take coalitions much more seriously than we have these last ten years. There are unlikely to be majorities in local councils and this is likely to feed through to parliament following the next general election.

Will we look back at control by one party and an opposition by another?  Will we be nostalgic for those days before May 7th 2026 ?

The FT says we have entered the era of 7 party politics. Labour and the Conservatives combined account for barely a third of voters in polls — threatening the UK’s constitutional certainties.

I am not disappointed at this but I know that it will have profound implications for future policy in pensions, the area where I work and most readers of this blog are focussed workwise. For many of us, we have spent our careers and maybe our retirements in a two party certainty and it will be hard to adjust.

The difficulty of multiple parties forming a Government is accommodating so many manifestos. Take out the “independents” who are there in local Government, consider a Welsh, Northern Ireland and Scottish nationalist input who together make up “other” and consider five UK parties including Reform, Green and Liberal parties (currently in that order in terms of voting intentions).

Where do the ABI , Pensions UK and the IMA focus there lobby? What space is there for radical alternatives to the structures of LGPS and Public Sector Unfunded Pensions when Reform UK are likely to be a force? What will be the radical policies of the Green party to a politicised pension debate?

My thinking is that we will not get a coalition of thinking that can allow another pensions bill as dominated as the Pension Schemes Bill. I doubt that we would have changes to pension tax as we are seeing on IHT and Salary Sacrifice, there will not be the confidence of our current Pensions Minister that things can be done.

This is why I am very glad (well maybe “perky”) that we have CDC legislation on the books and the framework of the Pension Schemes Bill in place.

Whether we get all the secondary legislation in place to make issues such as “small pots” go away I doubt. I suspect that pension superfunds may not have all the legislation that they’ve been promised and some of the powers proffered to GPP owners to adapt to a new consolidating DC (and CDC) world, may never see the light of day.

The FT remarks that coalitions may be in place before as well as after the next general election

Reform and the Tories could come up with some kind of pact before polling day, while Labour could end up doing a deal with the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP or Plaid Cymru.

But it is very unlikely that this will lead to anything as complete or progressive that we’ve seen for pensions in the first two years of this Government. Add to the secondary legislation we will have before 2029 , including another launch of legislation for Retirement CDC and you can see how important that huge majority Labour fluked at the last election was.

There were many people in our bubble who did not want change in this parliament and who secretly hoped the Pension Schemes Bill would not be enacted. But what is being enacted is progressive and comes from a Mansion House Accord that was supported by the dominant parties who emerged from the mess of Truss and 2022.

It led to a commitment to consolidation, the hi-jacking of a consumer VFM to reduce the numbers of pension schemes in the UK and a turning from “freedom” back to pensions, whether DB, DC or CDC. This is coherent and consistent and we have got it in place before the proliferation of parties takes on power through coalitions when this Government draws to an end.

With the majority it has and an unpleasant alternative (to its eyes) in future, we can expect this Government to play the full five years and be governing  as close as it can to July 9th 2029. That is the deadline for getting things done; – for after that I suspect we will have “deadlock”.