We are in a mess and this complaint from Richard Smith is only one of a number I’ve received since the publication of a second consultation on Retirement CDC and a first on Guided Retirement.
People have been promised a pension not a pot, still less a potting shed full of pots and a number of gardeners to make the most of the clutter.
Where people are moving from pots to pensions in advance of retirement, there need not be clutter, people could have time to shake the gardener’s hands, offer thanks and take pots to give themselves a retirement wage increase. That’s what is being offered by the existing working pension collective pension (sadly known as CDC UMES)
But existing working CDC is the other side of consultation, it’s done and is not what these consultations are talking about. I can only liken the pot to a cluttered potting shed , full of gardeners with your pots and their ideas for potting.
Here’s an expert completely mystified how guided retirement will work.
Here’s another gentle man with a lifetime working with people to get them pensions
Martin Freeman
Pensions technology consultant and leader
Depressing is the word. This consultation is a hot mess of confusion and contradiction.
I haven’t gone through it in detail yet, but it reminds me of writing an essay and realising half way through that you were barking up the wrong tree, but you’d run out of time and had to make the most of it.Retirement is a person level thing, if not a household one. Making half a dozen schemes offer you half a dozen different default options makes the process even more baffling.
And, as you say, the introduction of Dashboards means GR will be out of date before it is launched.There’s a lot to unpick here.
Here’s me – of an age and with the passion
The selling point for Guided Retirement (GR) is that unlike the “crystallised” DB, CDC or an annuity, the pot is free to spend as the pot-holder likes. This suits sophisticated spenders but it doesn’t make much sense for people wanting to have a simple wage in retirement.
We have a problem with small pots, we have a problem with inconsistent retirement ages, we have nothing to compare the different types of retirement income that are available from drawdown, annuity and two types of pensions (DB and CDC).
What is needed is merchandising of pensions that makes sense of them to 17 million workers presented with an infinite variety of answers to their simple question “what do I get”.
I too am a little depressed, knowing that the majority of employers will not join a workplace collective pension and consequently condemn their staff to the choice of opting out , getting paid through “guided retirement” or belatedly being paid a CDC pension.
Here’s the merchandising from the Government
Guided retirement consultation could do with a merch section. https://t.co/WiL90tSw5z
— David Robbins (@David_J_Robbins) November 3, 2026
I’ve always believed pension pots should be consolidated by default, unless there is a good reason not to do so. There will be some examples of the latter, but these should not be the norm.
The pension industry should not be allowed to turn the consequences of its own fragmentation into a seemingly permanent business opportunity.
People change jobs.
Their pension arrangements should accommodate that fact of working life.
A private pension system that leaves people with up to a dozen separate accounts and then expects them to make sophisticated decisions about each one has got its priorities wrong.
Automatic enrolment partially solved an important problem by making pension saving the default, except for the self-employed.
We now need the equivalent reform for consolidation, followed by a coherent system for converting accumulated savings into retirement income.
The Government’s small pots consultation is a step towards the first objective; its Guided Retirement proposals address the second.
The danger is that the two reforms proceed separately and produce yet another layer of industry administration. 
The test should be simple. Does the system maximise the pension and retirement security received by the saver, or does it maximise the number of pots, products and intermediaries through which that saver must pass?
If it is the latter, reform needs to be much more radical.
Yes, follow-up on the many benefits of Auto-Enrollment with the benefits of Auto-Consolidation, with opt-outs again for the sophisticates who want finer-grained control.
Together with a Dashboard that contains everything, with daily updates of account balances.