Yesterday I had a lot of conversations on Linked one and one that suggested my support of Torsten Bell and his Government’s proposed introduction of Guided Retirement and with it Retirement Collective Pension Schemes (R-CDC as was) was self supporting as I was promoting CDC in general.

This isn’t right. Pensions Mutual,a type of CDC that is often called “whole of life” and is a kind of workplace pension is completely separate from Guided Retirement. A lot of pensions including occupational DB pensions and the State Pension have nothing to do with Guided Retirement and one of two reasons that employers are putting forward is that it avoids their staff having to go through the process of choosing what happens to their pot. Guided Retirement is for those who do not choose and who are happy to have their pension turned to pot and I support that.

I support it not because it promotes my kind of CDC but because for a large proportion of those with a pension pot, there is no guarantee of pension and hasn’t been since 2015. A large number of people say they want to have direction , be “given” a pension and that’s what Guided Retirement does. A quick flick through the 11,000 blogs will allow you to search out over 100 blogs since 2014 in support of pension freedom but also supporting a default for those who couldn’t in their sixties make decisions about pension pots.

To make it clear, Pensions Mutual is not a RCPS nor likely to be. I have made it clear that it is appropriate for DC Schemes but the  workplace collective CDC pension is already available for authorisation and we are intending to be authorised as soon as possible.

It seems entirely responsible of Torsten Bell and his Government to have brought in, through the Pension Schemes Act, a Guided Retirement Framework within this parliament. It will be for those who do not want to take a “pot to pension” decision and do not want to make a decision to retain pension freedoms.

I have had conversations over the weekend with Tom McPhail and Ros Altmann, both of whom are uncomfortable with the way that Guided Retirement is now taking the next stage through secondary legislation on which Government is consulting. It looks highly likely that with the majority it has, the Government would have got its way, even if it had no reasonable argument, the major debate was over the Act which brings in Guided Retirement at a higher level than the detail put forward in the consultation.

But the accusation made in the Times, which I object to, is that this Government is abusing the power of its parliamentary majority.

This politicisation of pensions is wrong. The country gave the Labour party the majority in the last Government, it gave them the right to introduce pension legislation and to implement it. The right wing may not like this but they should not call this a “Pension Power Grab”. All this Government is doing is implement an Act that went through both houses of parliament and is now law.

For what it’s worth, I vote Liberal, my family have voted Liberal, my father was one of the few Liberal leaders of a County Council and while I do not vote Labour, I do respect what they are doing to turn pots to pensions. As I said earlier, you will find over 100 blogs calling for pensions not pots to be the default of a workplace pension.

I will continue to promote workplace Collective (CDC) Pensions to employers, to unions and to advisors, not as “better than DB or DC” but as more appropriate to certain types of workforce. It is not for me to tell employers their workforce is right for such collective pensions, it is for them to work that out themselves and we expect that most employers will go through a selection process involving a Request For a Proposal. We would expect consultation with unions and members as to what they want and we’d expect some variant to the question  “do you want a pot or a pension” to arise.

We will be making it obvious as Proprietor and Trustees of a Collective (CDC) Pension that it is quite different from DC and we will not say that it is better for everyone. We will lay out the differences and employers, unions, advisors and members can make up their mind.

Choice is the freedom that is available to everybody, we can all reject the guarantee of  pension for the freedom of a pot. But people are enrolled into a workplace pension which they’ll get unless they say “no thankyou”.