You’d have thought so , listening to the first third of Darren and Nico’s podcast. JP Morgan are singled out as the main distributor of alcohol to a deprived group of delegates.

It looks like the price for Darren to go has dropped to just £600 which includes bottomless champagne. I have been offered this deal but have turned it down. In a month I will have been off the hooch for two years and I find the allure of Pensions UK has fallen since my accident.

What happens when a guest drops out?

Whatever happened to the host left Darren and Nico to do another twosome of a show. I rather like these sessions as both are witty, insightful and representative of the pensions industry’s latest thinking.

I get from listening to Darren that he is inclining towards pensions and away from freedom from pensions. This has been going on some time and if he can stay upright away from the drinks hall and the pub he’s holding his off-premises piss up, he can see Guy Opperman and company getting stuck into CDC

The worry for DC from defaults

While the optimistic Philp was cheery, the pessimistic Aspinall was not. He sees the future of DC as an impossible default for trustees to choose. There’s an antipathy to getting trustees to guide people down a pathway which gives lifetime income. It’s a risk that trustees shouldn’t (in Nico’s opinion) have to take.

I do agree, it shouldn’t be a risk to find a way to exchange a DC pot for a lifetime income and whether the answer is an annuity purchased now-  or flexed and fixed at some point in the future, annuity ‘s the only way that has emerged so far. To only way to avoid losing freedom by being pensioned is to opt out. I have to say that if you asked most people what a pension trustee was tasked to do, “entrusting that people got a pension” would be high on a list of answers.

The Pensions Scheme Act makes it clear that people who can’t make a decision will have a decision taken for them by trustees and this is causing Nico (and I think he’s right to say DC trustees) a lot of concern. Nico thinks that turning a pot to pension is just too hard. We’ll see, that should be an interesting decision in the drinking hall.

What else is being discussed?

Well it’s laid out pretty well by Darren on his advertisement for this session

We cover:
➗ Politics and pensions: are new dividing lines emerging?
🖼️ Value for money: are we missing the bigger picture?
💰 Retirement defaults: can we really deliver good outcomes without understanding what people want?
📉 Private markets: are we backing Britain or backing the wrong horses?
🏡 Inheritance tax: another complication in an already complicated retirement landscape.

Next week’s session will no doubt be a reprise of the extravagance called Pensions UK , annual conference that starts with a trip to Liverpool on Tuesday and doesn’t end till everyone departs  homewards  on Thursday.