The Pensions Commission is a little light on what we have already that can help us get through to 2050. I’ll only be 89 then and hope I’ll have plenty of life in me!

Here are the 5 sections of the Commission’s report that I’d like to add some lustre too. We could be a lot further to 2050 than we think!

I don’t think there’s much sense in a very long executive summary followed by chapter summaries (not to forget chapter 6 which is a conclusion.  So I will re-publish the 5 chapter summaries and add to each chapter a few thoughts on what we could do better with what we’ve got.

We can do one thing that we haven’t done and that is get this message over to those who are under 40. I don’t see much youth on the Commission. We’re the lucky ones who are pulling up the drawbridge on our children to enjoy retirement in our moated castle.

The choice that Chapter One sets me is whether to be smug  , whether to share my wealth through taxation,  or whether to find ways that younger people can participate in what I’ve got through productivity and investment. All of these are possible – we have the tools to hand.

We have some of the best data on how rubbish we are at saving and how poor we are and will be in retirement. We have the capacity to produce any number of reports looking at our income n retirement and it will always come back to the same conclusions, we haven’t got enough from savings . I’m not sure this deserves a chapter but all these reports sent to Pension Commission had to find a place other than the waste paper bin or “trash” as my folder calls this stuff.

When it comes down to it , we have those who are being bullied into saving via auto-enrolment and those who chose not to or do so reluctantly (contributing as little as the employer let’s them).

Employers are fine so long as you have one but many people don’t have a boss – either because they are unemployed, self-employed or simply not being in a position to look for work. 40% of us are like this and though we are at record lows of unemployment , it is not going to be solved by the Pension Commission. We don’t have a way to force people into employment! We don’t have a way of making people save more other than turning auto-enrolment into pension taxation.

To get through to 2050 , we are going to have to be resilient. There are those in their 90s who can remember what it was like during the second world war and those in their 80s who can remind the austerity of rationing, but those of us born from the mid fifties have never really had it hard and while things may not be quite as good as they were 20 years ago, we are a pretty cossetted society. We are going to have to relearn resilience if things get worse over the next quarter of  century. Tough! The millennials like me may have to pull in our fat tummies!

This section has got all the attention because it points at the three groups who get a bad deal out of the pension system, the self-employed, the women who can’t do a full career’s work and people who don’t earn much for a host of reasons.

I could point out a few things that people could do to make things better. The self-employed can save into Nest though nobody tells you and you have to work hard to find out any details.

As with so much else in the Commission’s report I find a lot of blogs on the issue. I also find reports such as Prospect’s gender pension gap research, with the 8th edition due out in a couple of months.

This is how I find the first four chapters which takes us to page 143 and perhaps the most contentious of the report.

This report doesn’t pull any punches.

Having saved throughout their working lives, people deserve and rightly expect access to fair, stable retirement incomes. Yet relying on individuals to actively engage with the complexity of decumulation decision-making does not always appear to be
effective.

While government is taking steps to support decision-making at retirement, this support must operate as a genuine default wherever possible. Strong, well designed defaults are essential to ensure that the vast majority of savers – regardless
of level of engagement, pension wealth, or demographics – is protected from the real possibility of declining standards of living the longer they live

Instead it demands changes – which is what the Pension Schemes Act is going to deliver (subject to secondary legislation) and what CDC is already delivering and could deliver a lot more when regulation is in place. This gets a couple of paragraphs.

Infact chapter 5 is a little long and a little tedious a  rehearsal of so many reports that have been produced over the past ten years.

In its conclusion, the Commission states

The State Pension is delivering what the first Commission recommended, but private pensions are not doing enough.

Let’s not get too angry with the private sector and remember that it hasn’t been till the 2025 CDC legislation that CDC has become good enough for everyone but the Royal Mail. Steve Webb tried to introduce CDC in 2015 but it took ten years to get agreement of what could deliver.

Conclusions are hard to find

There are five chapters and a lot of introduction and conclusions. But it is hard to see what the next steps can be. There are solutions to most of the problems identified that need to be implemented.

It’s a lot of pages to get to conclusions that this blog and those who write me blogs and commentary came to some time ago. The Pension Commission will not have a problem to solve that hasn’t got an answer waiting for someone who will listen!