This is an excellent post from a BP pensioner. It is written by someone who didn’t work in pensions about the impact of poor corporate governance on him and other pensioners.
I don’t see this getting much publication within pensions but Murray speaks for a generation who had a promise which is not being met.
The pension industry has an obligation to older generations. At BP the treatment of its pensioners is a weather gauge for corporate governance. The reputation that BP built up over the last century could be lost in a few years. It need not be.
We consider “governance” as something controlled by Trustees of occupational pension schemes. But too often promises made to pensioners are not kept and the issue drops off the corporate agenda because pensioners are thought not to matter.
BP is an organisation that has a proud history as a pension provider. I remember sitting at the feet of Alan Herbert and learning about occupational pensions from him. Learning about Reward and pensions from Simon Dudley. Sally Bridgeland was for long BP’s pension scheme CEO. These are people who inspired people who were learning about pensions to regard BP as a company that treated pensioners with the respect once they’d retired that they had earned as workers.
It is not hard for BP to put matters for pensioners right. It has a surplus in its pension scheme and I would hope that it would consider improving its workplace pension arrangements for current workers – perhaps using that surplus to give them pensions and not pension pots.
To sum up, I hope that BP will regard pensions in future with the importance they have done in the past.