This news from Broadstone will not make much sense to those who swapped their DB pension for a pension pot in the years and months  leading up to October 2022.

The latest update from the consultancy’s quarterly DB Redress Tracker, which provides an indicator of the amount of compensation a member who had been ill-advised to transfer out of their DB scheme would receive, found a gain in pension continues to be expected in the majority of cases and therefore no redress would be payable as the consumer is judged to be better off as a result of transferring. The tracker estimated the gain for Q3 2026 would be £59,000, which it noted is higher than the approximately £40,000 gain the tracker recorded over the previous three quarters.

Let’s cast our minds back to the five years before 2022, the years when employers were still paying compensation into DB schemes that were considered basket cases. When members were told that they would be better off in anything but a DB scheme heading for the PPF.

At that time, smart people like Baroness Altman explained to me and a group of FT guests that transfer values were ridiculously high and if ever they should be taken it was then. The reason CETVs were so high was that gilts were so low and the reason for that was quantitative easing  (QE). When QE was relaxed and ended with Liz Truss, the so called deficits in DB pension schemes ended, the accounting cost of pensions plummeted and so did CETVs.

It took a bit of time for the fall in gilt yields , the rise of interest rates and the collapse of CETVs to stop people taking transfers. Finally the FCA had found a way to help transfers from happening – abolishing a no win no fee offer from transfers (which was no loss but no help as the rush was over).

But there was something else that the FCA brought in. Redress for those whose transfer value might not have bought someone back the pension they had given up. In the early days of transfer restitution, that time after BSPS and  Port Talbot’s “Time to Choose” took the natter to national attention, there was no way you could buy your pension back with an annuity and redress was paid on the shortfall. But in time, annuities went up and almost doubling.

In time redress has been hard to claim. That’s because redress is basically the shortage of income from annuities relative to the pension lost to the CETV. Forget about the local issues with markets, the big deal is that CETVs were over valued (Ros Altmann and Merryn Somerset-Webb worked this out. Meryn’s famous remark “if I had a DB scheme I’d transfer it” was right for the wealthy.

But that’s the point. The people who BSPS was for were steelworkers and not working like Meryn for the FT, like Ros – whose career had been in the City. Most BSPS workers like the idea of getting hundreds of thousands now, not an income for life. The crime of Port Talbot was pandering to their vulnerability, I don’t mean to sound disparaging to steelworkers, I could not do their job any more than they could do mine, but I saw the faces fall when Al Rush and I told them that they had been duped into thinking the transfer was a “no-brainer”.

We said at the time to the lawyers, TPR and FCA that a crime had been committed and that restitution should be paid out of the financial advisers bank accounts. I think that everyone who was recommended a transfer without explanation of what they were giving up should have had a fixed percentage of the transfer paid to the former member and that amount should have remained constant, not going up and down with inflation, assets and all the other things that drive annuity and DB pension’s values.

The work done by Broadstone on transfers is now redundant as is explained by this paragraph from the report in Professional Pensions

The firm also found the last time the tracker showed compensation would be payable was Q4 2024 at around £2,000, as the central estimate indicated a “clear and sustained” downward trend over recent years.

A financial regulator has devised a system that does not compensate for the damage to workers and their family. It compensates for financial markets misbehaving. While some steelworkers (and other workers) lost what they will need for decades to come, most advisers who misbehaved will get away Scott-free.

If that is justice, I’m a banana