Royal London wrote the last IGC report I commented on. They always looked to IGCs to promote Royal London’s pension capacity. But IGC’s were published the same year as pension freedom came in and the DC workplace pension providers were undergoing change. They no longer offered the money purchase to purchase an annuity, they provided a pot which could be drawn down any way the saver wanted.
The IGC was there to show the saver and the employer who was delivering that was being sent to them either through payroll or direct debit and it had to go a long way back in time, sometimes to the 1970s to comment on the early defined contribution contracts.
But this was important work. There had been work commissioned by Government (the FSA as it started) to put an end to over charging and under-delivering. The alternative to the IGC would have been a much more rigorous investigation. So the IGCs were set up as “independent” but the people marking the charges, investment and delivery of pensions – were appointed by the people whose work would be marked.
Where is it now? I have just read through a document promoting Royal London’s workplace pensions and scrolled to the page where I could find the IGC report. I was faced with a range of reporting but nothing about VFM, nothing from the IGC.
It was never going to work. The IGC report started long and ended longer. Standard Life and the numerous insurers it bought out, each wrote reports some 100 pages long. At its peak – before Covid – any sense of what was going in and what was coming out of these savings vehicles was drowned out by pie charts that told us that we were getting value for our money.
What was needed then , as is needed now, was a way to compare how we have done with how others have done. There was no attempt to offer this VFM service to the public. It has not been till Corporate Adviser’s CAPAdata service arrived and Sam Seaton took charge that we had a performance comparison service that employers and advisers (and the odd punter) go to.
One chart compares older savers 
One charter compares younger savers
Infact Corporate Adviser has become a source of research that’s trusted because it’s paid for and therefore independent.
We will go on trusting it so long as VFM reports continue to be published by the organisations being assessed. The FCA and TPR will have their own mechanism to number crunch but they do not have the capacity to judge providers. When I want to know about workplace pension I can go to Go’s excellent twice yearly information
It tells me which master trusts are going to make scale and which are struggling. It tells me a story that words cannot tell, and where is Royal London who I had been looking at? It isn’t here because it hasn’t bought out a master trust and still relies on a GPP for its existing and new business. This is what Go report on
Together with CAPAdata, it is possible to most of what you need to find out how your master trust and some of what you need about a GPP but this to me is what VFM is based on and it’s out there , available to us to compare.
I had started yesterday trying to find out about Royal London and ended it realising that the insurers who wanted to display VFM for contractual personal pensions don’t promote their IGC reports – if they still do them (I think they must do in some “musty” room).
IGMs were supposed to be our VFM check but they never got to the first base, it took outfits like Corporate Adviser, and Go and AgeWage to shake up the market and give them numbers that made sense and made comparisons meaningful.
IGCs are all but dead. They should have been put down long ago . I hope that we learn from commercial organisations that charge for data crunching. We can’t let providers mark their own work again, otherwise the regulatory VFM will be dead too.
