This is a First Actuarial morning for me. It is the only consultancy I’ve worked for which made sense to me and they’re at it again, working with TPT to promote CDC at the Labour Party Conference.

You may consider it naive of me to give credit to a competitor (TPT) but not a bit of it. TPT are the only one of the multi-employer collective pensions organisations preparing for authorisation who have the money to run an event like this!

We certainly don’t right now! Thanks to Andy O’Regan and Ruari Grant for what they’ve to get a packed room

I can thank the folk pictured individually and collectively. The Pensions Minister has been an advocate and was again yesterday. TPT’s Ruari Grant reports

The minister made a key reference to cdc as ‘pensions’, as opposed to DC which he categorised as ‘savings pots’ and thus highlights exactly what cdc is trying improve on.

David (Lord) Pitt Watson has been promoting CDC and collective pensions since early this century. He’s got to the House of Lords and is now a Treasury Minister. He has to be a most important figure in the Labour Party by now!

Andy O’Regan is Client Strategy Officer for PTP and announced his being the Chair with this statement

we’ll be discussing how Collective Pensions could help deliver more predictable retirement outcomes and what needs to happen next to support wider adoption.

Sue Ferns, Deputy of Prospect Union is precisely the person who can create wider option of CDC. I know her union well and will be promoting CDC with them at a member webinar tomorrow.

Finally Craig Moran, who I have worked with and is a stalwart of First Actuarial in the north west. He takes over the mantle of Hilary Salt and Derek Benstead who brought the idea of CDC to CWU and Royal Mail, breaking the breakdown between the two when things looked bad.

Much has moved on but the basics of collective pensions remain the same and CDC has been a cross-party initiative which for its first six years had the support of a Conservative Government.

So well done TPT for putting this on , early on a Monday morning in Liverpool. There is not much support from Pensions UK for CDC but there is plenty of support from CFOs and HRDs who sit on large employer boards. It is large employers who will lead the way for by and large they are unionised and it is unions who are pressing hard for an upgrade from DC workplace pensions.

CDC needs all the publicity it can get

We need to take this conversation further. We won’t get much at another conference in Liverpool coming up shortly – the Pensions UK annual conference. There only one session (at the back end and one of three concurrent sessions) looks at CDC.

I’m not able to go there either (I cannot afford it and I haven’t the time right now).

I will be speaking at the East Midlands Pensions UK  meeting on Thursday and am grateful for being given a chance to support the workplace CDC that is both collective and a pension!