Some time ago, I spent an afternoon in Melton Mowbray with people whose company I enjoyed and an address by John Hamilton that changed my way of thinking about growth in pensions.

What followed was a  realisation that CDC could deliver what Defined Benefit no longer can and Defined Contribution will struggle to match. I mean CDC or what I increasingly call it – the collective pension.

Two years later I was back talking to this group in the middle of Leicestershire (I don’t quite know where as I was driven there from Birmingham airport and its fine train station).

This time I had a CDC scheme to present and as an example of how CDC questions from this group could be answered with reference to our Pensions Mutual CDC scheme.

So what about this CDC Question Time?

Advertising had led  to a fine turn out of pension professionals from the East Midlands Pensions UK group (EMPUK)

The concept of CDC questions was introduced by clarifying what EMPUK wanted to know about. They didn’t want to know about Retirement CDC. They wanted to know about everything else

This group of professionals wanted to know what a CDC plan did for members and for employers sponsoring it.

My audience wanted to know what we were focussing on to get Pensions Mutual to be a CDC plan.

They asked “what’s needed to get up to speed in terms of membership is one thing, but how must it operate? What has got to happen under the bonnet for the scheme to get up and running?”

This question appeared  most important , “how can members tell what they are getting and feel happy that they’re getting value for the money they’ve deferred taking from pay?”

“What stands in the way of providing hundreds of thousands with a wage in retirement?”

and what’s this mutual structure in “Pensions Mutual” going to mean?

And then I was asked an easier one – “What’s the experience of your start up team?”

Finally they asked “when do you expect to be ready?”