Kathryn Fleming – DC consultant at Hymans Robertson
It was the end of a hot and steamy week and two hours before the Norway vs France game. I thought I’d listen to a couple of podcasts while sorting out the garden, ducks and birds.
The first I listened to was Kathryn Fleming with Darren and Nico
81 minutes later, I tuned into the BBC’s Webcast to find out what was going on. At the same time that the VFM pension was launched, Newscast made its final story the speech by Andy Haldane at British Chambers of Broadcast where he advocated making tax relief dependent on our money being invested according the Mansion House Accord.
You can listen to it from minute 28 to the end. It’s six minutes of pure brilliance and the link is here.
If you want a fuller story, here’s what has been blasted from the Times and Guardian. Sorry but it is the pension story of the week because it involves our investment, our tax-relief and something that could be in the next budget.
When I woke this morning , it was Haldane and not Fleming’s words that were on my mind. In retrospect, this is unfair to Kathryn Fleming. Here is Darren’s explanation about what took up 81 minutes of my life
In this episode of V-FM Pensions hosts Darren and Nico chat to Hymans Robertson’s Head of DC Kathryn Fleming. Kathryn is a PPI Trustee and co-chair of the Pension Equity Group’s Data and Research Workstream.
We chat about the work of the Pensions Commission, including the recent PEG report arguing that a financial safety net needs to be introduced to support any future reforms. We talk adequacy, fairness and affordability, and discuss what more employers can do to support better retirement outcomes. We touch on early access to pension saving, CDC, and manage to get in a dig about DC chair’s statements.
We also find out how Kathryn got into pensions and, of course, ask what value for money means to her.
Having read this, I would say that what interested me was how someone as bright and fluent as Kathryn could make such boring nonsense interesting. Indeed congratulations to Darren and Nico too because I realise now that one reason that I listen to the Podcast is to find how a boring subject can be made interesting.
Sadly, on this occasion I found the podcast let me down. Kathryn is so good at explaining how the minutia of pensions work, what can be done for small pots, how those who aren’t saving can be encouraged to save – the list of subjects touched upon seemed endless , but so very sensible.
I suspect it is the job of a really good consultant to make us understand how sensible it would be if we did what consultants advise. Included on the topics on the list was CDC which Kathryn made so plausible that Nico could find no way to rant against it. This is how good consultants get the pension agenda tilted towards them.
I admire Kathryn Fleming for making the boring job ever of DC pension consultant, interesting for 81 minutes.
But in truth, I suspect that people will be more interesting to hear about Andy Haldane and if I can get hold of a podcast that delivers Andy’s speech, I’ll be at it. The thing about Haldane is that he admits to knowing nothing about the minutiae of pensions. Yet she makes such sense of the big things that pensions do that they rather dwarf our interest in the detail.
This was perhaps a bigger lesson for me than even the minutiae that Kathryn and the boys discussed. The big things that interest us in pensions are what funded pensions do; they pay people pensions and they are the reservoirs that water the farms beside them.
We need a former economist of the Bank of England to capture the imagination of the public!