BP’s pensioners will not give up on the pensions they’ve been promised.

Posted on September 20, 2026 by henry tapper

It is time BP asked itself what it’s outrageous position is doing for itself. For all the money it has paid into pensions, its pension is causing them nothing but a problem. Its reputation is diminishing over the time of this dispute. Anyone who knows about pensions knows that eventually BP will need to pay some of its surplus to the people who it promised this money to.

BP employed some very talented people who had strong principles. Murray is one of them. They will not give up on getting the pensions they were promised.

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Teacher’s pay rise partially funded by a drop in pension payments into LGPS

Posted on September 20, 2026 by henry tapper

The pension surpluses found in the private sector are as great (if not greater) in the Council’s funded Local Government Pension Scheme. This is a blog that explores the mis-understandings that followed an announcement from the Government that teacher’s pay increases would be fully funded.

In the run-up to the pay decision, the NEU announced it would launch a formal ballot for industrial action unless the government made a fully-funded, above-inflation pay offer.

The NEU teaching union hailed this week’s teacher pay announcement as a “significant” victory that will ensure this year’s rise is fully funded and plug a £460 million black hole in school budgets. Teachers will get 3.5% which is slightly the UK average pay increase of 3.6%. At first this does not look like a pay award above the normal.

But we should note that an increase in pay for Teachers will also mean an increase in the wage in retirement offered to Teachers from their pension scheme. That’s because it is based on how much Teachers are paid. So it could be argued that the pay increased is supplemented from the deferred pay increase from the Teacher’s pension.

With the pay and deferred pay improvement, I  see this increase as above average. The award was made earlier in the year when average earnings were lower so it was a victory for the NEU and now a proper victory.

The teacher pay award for 2026-27 will be funded “at a national level” from savings to employer contributions for support staff pensions, the government has claimed. This means that the teachers will not be in hock to Government for a part of the payment (they will not have to make cuts, to meet the pay rise cost).

The money that they’d had to find under the original offer is now fully funded by the Government out of money they would have paid into LGPS. Support staff in schools are in the LGPS.

The support staff do not get access to the unfunded Teachers Pension but to the over-funded LGPS which is heading towards a contribution holiday (remember them) for its sponsors. The sponsors are the employers that include the Government.

The GMB says the government’s announcement is “misleading” and that they are being treated “like idiots”. The Times finds a way to cast the unions as greedy and divided.

So what is really going on?

There is an important precedent at stake here. The Government – one way or another – is paying most of LGPS’ costs. Whether it is directly (as with the Teacher support staff’s pension contributions) or indirectly through Council pension contributions the scope for savings in the short term is enormous.

The Local Government Pension Scheme in England and Wales has just published its healthiest set of valuation results in a generation. The LGPS funding level, assets measured against the pensions promised, has climbed from 107% to 122% in three years, and the aggregate surplus has more than trebled to £72.9 billion. Employer contribution rates are falling from April 2026 as a result. If you’re one of the scheme’s 7.2 million members, the obvious questions follow: does a surplus mean a bigger pension?

The answer is emphatically “no” but neither is the surety of your LGPS pension (if you are in it). That’s because the pension payments are guaranteed by Councils. You’d have to see Councils going bust for pensions not to be paid in full to pensioners.

So with the best will to the GMB, while the chances of the surplus being shared with pensioners, the chances of pensioners getting a lower pension are both close to zero. The GMB may be wrong here , I can see why they are angry for DB pensions in general, most of which are in surplus. The unions argue that this money is owing to ordinary scheme members.

Private sector employers using pension surpluses to pay bills they’ve incurred is good news  for shareholders and for the executive of the employer. It doesn’t do much for ordinary workers who make up GMB (or other unions) membership.

Is this really a national agreement? Is it good news for all teachers?

An analysis of 2025 pension schemes from the LGPS advisory board found the average total employer contribution rate fell from 21.5 per cent of payroll costs to 16.5 per cent, following the latest valuation.

This is an average reduction of 4.9 percentage points – but the change at individual fund level ranged from 0 to a fall of 10.2 percentage points.

The board also says there was “significant variation” between funds and it expected “even more variation at the individual employer level”, because contributions are set for individual employers.

It remains to be seen how much subsidy from the LGPS pension scheme will happen when the council has been told by the actuary they should not take a partial contribution holiday.

Maybe this isn’t good news for all schools and their budgets.

The Government isn’t alone in eyeing up the LGPS surplus!

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How do we afford long term care? Tuesday’s pre-budget coffee morning explores!

Posted on September 20, 2026 by henry tapper

As pension playpen people, we can’t ignore the question of long term care. It is a drain on our economy but it’s also a drain on our pensions.

At this week’s Pension PlayPen Coffee Morning, we’ve asked Tom Scott to talk with us about how Andy Burnham can afford to offer social care to those who may need it for the rest of their lives. The vast majority of these are pensioners.

This may not be the easiest subject to talk about but if anyone can, it’s the Pension PlayPen and you only have till Tuesday to wait

To join the session on Tuesday 22nd September at 10.30 am – click here

Please join us for our next Coffee Morning in which we take a look at the state of Long Term Care in the UK.

The event will be presented by Long Term Care guru, Tom Scott and he will be commenting on:

  • how difficult it is for the state to fund care
  • the pros and cons of funding care
  • the difficulty of transferring tax money, essentially from young people to old people
  • the fact that ultimately you can’t take it with you when you go

If the state funds care for people with assets, essentially what it is doing is funding the inheritance of their beneficiaries who can often be quite wealthy in their own right.

 

To join the session on Tuesday 22nd September at 10.30 am – click here

If you have a problem with the link, try the URL
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/322079075773549?p=nhhK5KlxSGBwCaY7Xo
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Opperman sees growth for Britain by incentivising pension funds with tax-breaks

Posted on September 20, 2026 by henry tapper

nursing the baby firms in the UK

Guy Opperman is a very good commentator on politics and here he is reporting on the prospects from a pension. He is a conservative politician trying to be balancing. On this pod he is in the company of people who want a Government to cut spending, reduce debt and meet out austerity on the lucky people of Britain who have been profligate.

Opperman reckons that what’s needed is investment in high tech manufacturers  (not data centres). This is politically popular spending and it gives momentum to Andy Burnham’s steady start. There is no appetite to do more cutting in a country that doesn’t feel it has a lot of room to tighten its belt. This is not the news that the hosts wanting politicians to reduce risk, increase return but be responsible. This seems to Guy impossible unless some drastic action is taken. The action will he hopes come from pension schemes who he hopes will be given the same tax breaks individuals get to invest in start ups via EIS. This will get money into start ups to get them to scale ups. I’m not sure this is where there is a shortage of investment. But the principle can be transported into an investment into scale ups.

The question that Opperman is putting is about how decisions are taken to get money from British pensions back into the British economy. Torsten Bell (our pension system) would point to the change in pensions where it is no longer the saver who is being urged to take this decision, it is the scheme’s investment team. The scheme is no longer a group of personal pensions but a master trust destined to be larger than £25bn within a few years.

Decisions are likely to be taken in the future is by pension schemes about what their fund looks like and how investment is implemented by investment managers. Opperman rightly uses the platform of this podcast to point out that pensions now have the opportunity to restore growth by putting capital in the hands of those capable of growing our economy – the entrepreneurs that Britain has been good at encouraging for 300 years.

Short term pothole filling , long-term projects or both?

Opperman complains that the OBR has made the Government’s decisions rather limited. It is very hard for pot-holes to be filled or long-term projects to be invested in because of the OBR’s fiscal limitations. Goodness! Opperman at this point sounds a very left-wing politician demanding we invest for growth against the OBR’s restrictions. The answer is to be through pensions which get round the red and green books in the Treasury. He cites the booking of the gains from the salary sacrifice pension cuts which will come in in 2029 but whose savings have already been booked.

Covert cuts and overt spending

Opperman thinks that the new Chancellor will cut further the tax free cash from pensions (an example of covert cuts).

Projects that don’t deliver much by 2029 are pushed down the road (or cancelled). But Opperman turns the conversation around saying there’s in Rotherham on the Orgreave colliery site a group of small manufacturing companies including those investing in technology. He points to a new railway being built into Newcastle and he’s done what he does very well which is getting people to look at matters optimistically. Julian Bovill and Ben Kumar get excited and the podcast slips along till we get to bonds.

The worry that “we’re not on our own”.

We are vulnerable to bad things happening in the Middle East and Opperman says that his former constituency farmers aren’t producing much food because of the hot summer and we will be seeing inflation going up because we import it from abroad stuff that should have come to us through Hormuz.

The pod ends in a dark place which is a shame as Opperman is at his optimistic best. The two hosts are natural pessimists it seems. That seems to be because the Government’s not on the side of the rich.

The rich are rather on their own awaiting the budget.

I’m delighted that Opperman is bold enough to be optimistic about the future we might have. There are not many in the City (or in this case Shoreditch) who share Guy Opperman’s  optimism about the budget.

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Brian Henderson’s view of VFM for those getting a retirement income.

Posted on September 20, 2026 by henry tapper
Nico
Darren

Brian Henderson is so very humble about what he’s doing that it’s hard to remember how much influence he has had. He was Mercer’s Director of DC consulting throughout the period when workplace pensions were being established.  Mercer helped  the requirement of over 1m employers , offering them something to auto-enrol their staff into.

Sad to say , Mercer did a pretty bad job building its own master trust.  Since moving into other parts of Mercer. Brian left behind a rather limp DC consulting proposition. Mercer not Brian has bought the shocking NOW pensions and has been most quiet on CDC to the point that I forget that they are one of the largest benefit consultants. They’re a bit of a stinker on DC and CDC at the moment!

I suspect that the pro-bono work that Brian’s doing on DC work today is a penance for his former firm’s lack of positive influence!

I have to say, Brian speaks for a lot of those inside the industry and he speaks for people like him (a DC guru) and Nico (a DC actuary) and Darren (a DC lover and economist) who are coming to terms with a fast-changing pension landscape.

On the one hand, we have CDC and the Pension Schemes Act that has turned saving for retirement (and pension) freedom, on the other we have the Pensions Commission. But most alarming to the pension industry is that CDC is becoming a disruptor. The success of CDC to capture the imagination of unions, large employers and some advisers is down to a Government which since 2018 has been moving towards a time of defined contribution that offers a pension not a pot.

In this episode of the V-FM Pensions series, Brian explains the reason he has done work explaining how the world has changed and how now the default for any pension saver is a pension. At well over 90 minutes, this podcast is in extra time but for once I think it is worth our time. I do like Brian and his recent work features on my blog because it is sane and soothes the troubled brows of those like the intrepid hosts of this pod. Brian’s is #172.

I will quote Darren who has written the introduction

In this episode of V-FM Pensions, hosts Nico and Darren chat to Brian Henderson, who last appeared on the podcast back in its early days in May 2023 (episode #19).

Brian returns to discuss his recent series of essays exploring the thorny question of how the pensions industry develops, and compares, retirement solutions.

Nico’s news story is about ‘P(doom)’, sparking an in-depth conversation about AI in which we even venture into the possibility of time travel…

We then get into Brian’s essays: what prompted him to write them and the conclusions he has drawn. At the heart of the discussion is a deceptively simple question: do we actually know what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to retirement solutions?

There are lots of proposed solutions with considerable merits, but all involve trade-offs. Are we properly understanding, testing and discussing those trade-offs? And are we doing enough to understand what people actually want and need from retirement?

We also catch up on what Brian’s been up to since he last joined us. But if you want to know what value for money means to Brian, you’ll have to go back and listen to episode #19…

For an understanding of what Brian’s essays are about, Brian has condensed his thinking into a relatively simple diagram.

Unsurprisingly, for folk like Brian, Darren and Nico – “drawdown throughout” gives the highest capital back to those for whom capital return is the principal requirement of pension saving.

Total income “CDC” is value for money for those who want income and has given the best overall deal if you live a little beyond 20 years after starting your collective pension.

This is very balanced. The listeners to the V-FM podcast are more likely to want to create wealth from their DC pot but may end up paying themselves a pension, as Brian says in the pod – there is a place for a minority for a third party – the annuity. But that doesn’t look VFM to me, not when CDC is available.

I sense that Flex and Fix is not the product for the super smart financial service people who have plenty of alternatives to their pension pot to drawdown from and Flex and Fix is really a halfway house between a pension and a drawdown with an annuity doing its job when people are supposed to have lost the capacity to take any form of risk. I suspect that Flex will last longer than 10 years (few will default savers into drawdown at 67 and kick them into annuities at 77, but we will see. Brian’s chart shows this doesn’t give much value and I suspect that Nest’s view – that the annuity is bought at 85 is better value and does not put member’s retirement income too much at risk.

But I do what this podcast does and I’m wittering on a little too much. Click on the link above and listen to the very pleasant conversation.

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A study of the risk of sudden improvement in longevity (NB CDC)

Posted on September 19, 2026 by henry tapper

Jim Hennington has worked on the main theme of this blog most of his career. He has helped make it  possible Australians to convert Super pots into lifetime pensions.

This is a post that Jim is pointing at people who know enough about pensions to understand what “stress-testing” of a pension model means. It means for Jim that the solution can withstand assaults of high inflation , market downturns and what is rarely considered, the impact of the length of retirement extending because we live longer.

I argue that the risk of improving longevity is a stress that can be managed by CDC but less easily by DB pensions and annuities

I will not publish the erudite work of actuaries as dear to us as Stuart McDonald, but I urge you to read Guy Coughlans and Richard Faragher’s study from this link.

This is Guy’s summary of his paper

What if the life expectancy of 65-year-olds increased by 10 years within a decade, not gradually and predictably but suddenly, driven by a medical breakthrough that financial markets recognise long before it is fully realised?

This paper argues that such an extreme longevity scenario, a high-impact/low-probability event involving a rapid and substan5al increase in lifespan and health span, has become a credible and underappreciated systemic risk for pension plans, insurers, reinsurers, governments and the wider financial
system.

Advances in the biology of ageing have fundamentally changed the outlook. Ageing is no longer viewed as an immutable process, but as one driven by identifiable and modifiable biological mechanisms, called the “hallmarks of ageing”.

Interventions targeting these mechanisms have already been shown to extend lifespan and healthspan in multiple species and improve metrics reflecting biological ageing in humans.

Emerging evidence suggests that combining such interventions may produce additive and synergistic effects, raising the possibility of a step-change improvement in lifespan. This is not simply about curing individual age-related diseases, but about targeting the underlying processes that drive them all.

I will add to this the thought that might be going through your head. Could pensions withstand the impact of a 10 year life expectancy? A DB scheme and Annuity that have promised a lifetime pension would need to turn to sponsoring employer or the insurance company insuring the annuity. This could lead to awkward consequences.

Although it would not be pleasant to break the news that pensions were falling, a CDC plan would comfort its members that they would on average be pensioners for 10 years. There would be no recourse to employer or insurer not threat of a haircut from the PPF or FSCS if employer or insurer went bust as a result of the bill presented by the actuary.

Guarantees are  difficult things and I would put a good word in for CDC plans as flexible enough to withstands the bizarre but very real risk of people living a lot longer!

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The Australians deciding what a Super’s for, and how it should be judged

Posted on September 19, 2026 by henry tapper

Jim Hennington has helped Australian savers to understand their Supers while they are working. But now millions of Australians are beyond saving and want to spend their savings.

How good are Supers at helping people do this. This is what we call the VFM of decumulation or (more simply) how good are they at paying pensions!

Jim and his colleague Clarissa turn their gaze on pensions from Supers and a simple way of judging them!

Here’s Clarissa Horwood, a colleague of Jim’s in the Australian press.

Penny had done everything she was supposed to do. She worked for more than 40 years. She paid her taxes. She contributed to her super fund every month without really thinking about it. Like many, she trusted that one day the system would somehow look after her.

Retirement was always vaguely on the horizon. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Just… eventually. Then one day, eventually arrived.

Penny wasn’t worried about leaving work. She was worried about leaving familiarity. She had savings, a respectable super balance, and no debt. Friends assured her she would be fine. The problem was that nobody could tell her what “fine” actually looked like.

Could she afford to spend $70,000 a year? Should it be $50,000? Would her money last another thirty years? Was she entitled to any Age Pension? Would a different investment option let her enjoy life more comfortably?

Every answer seemed to begin with another disclaimer. Every phone call ended somewhere else. Spending the money she had spent a lifetime accumulating suddenly felt far more complicated than earning it.

Penny is not unique. Forget the different account balances – how many Australians across the country shared the very same uncertainty?

It is crazy to think that Australia has more than $4 trillion invested in superannuation. It’s a country that has built one of the most successful retirement savings systems anywhere in the world. The system has mastered the art of helping Australians accumulate wealth, but what happens after that? 

Not about wealth

That is where the system becomes much less certain, because retirement is not ultimately about wealth.

Nobody retires hoping to admire an account balance. They retire hoping to live. To visit the grandchildren more often. To know they can afford the healthcare they’ll need as they grow older. To meet friends for dinner because they can. To travel while their knees still allow it. To say “yes” a little more often than “I’d better not”.

That is what a good retirement outcome looks like.

Penny hadn’t spent four decades saving only to spend retirement wondering whether she could afford to enjoy it.

She wanted the confidence to enjoy her super without worrying that every extra dollar spent today might create a problem ten years from now.

Those hopes were starting to create a quiet unease. Penny felt that the people safeguarding her nest egg were not helping her make good decisions. She knew she couldn’t be the only Australian asking that very same question.

Her uncertainty reflects a much larger problem within the superannuation industry itself. Even in 2026, its leaders have not settled on how a better retirement outcome should be defined or judged in practice.

Many funds still lack a clear and consistent way to define success for members in retirement. Although the industry has identified many relevant member needs, it has not yet translated them into a settled framework for judging whether one retirement strategy produces a better outcome than another.

As APRA deputy chair Margaret Cole told the 2025 Conexus Retirement Leaders Summit, trustees had “fallen short in tracking and measuring the success of their retirement income strategies”. The industry has plenty of metrics, but no settled way of determining what success ultimately looks like.

Balance three objectives

The Retirement Income Covenant tells trustees to help members balance three objectives: maximising expected retirement income, managing risks to its sustainability and stability, and some flexible access to funds during retirement. These are important considerations. But together they form a list of competing objectives, rather than an objective scoreboard.

Until trustees define what a better retirement outcome actually means, they cannot be clear about what outcome they are trying to improve for members such as Penny. As a result, they lack a sound basis for deciding whether a fund’s existing solution should be changed, whether one new product is better than another, or whether a strategy has genuinely improved outcomes for members in retirement.

That is the troubling disconnect at the centre of the retirement system: between the lives members hope to lead and the outcomes trustees are accountable for delivering. The industry has not yet translated the human needs sitting beneath Penny’s unease into clear objectives for super funds.

Penny was no actuary, but she had a good head for numbers. What she cared about wasn’t higher returns, extra investment choice or a fancy retirement calculator.

She simply hoped her super would allow her to live as well as her savings could reasonably support, using them efficiently, safely and without forcing a series of frightening decisions upon her.

Choose the ‘best’

If Penny were presented with several funds offering different retirement solutions and asked to choose the “best”, she would almost certainly favour the one that allowed her to sustain more spending each year and enjoy a better lifestyle without anxiety.

Penny would choose the fund that allows her to be a little more generous with her family at birthdays. To take two annual holidays instead of one. To employ a gardener occasionally, order a decent bottle of wine with dinner, or shout her best friend to nice seats at the theatre.

The “better” fund would give her more capacity to enjoy her retirement – but this cannot simply mean spending her balance faster at the expense of her future.

Penny could only relax into a better lifestyle if she believed it could last. She needed to know that tomorrow had been considered too. A high income from super today would be of little comfort if it created a constant fear of running short later.

Her friend Helen might value certainty above almost everything else. She would willingly give up some flexibility in exchange for knowing that a portion of her income would continue for life no matter what.

Her neighbour Peter might be comfortable accepting some investment fluctuations, provided he knew he’d retain accessible savings for future health or aged-care costs and a reasonable chance of leaving something to his children.

Penny, Helen and Peter may each prefer different settings, but they all want their super to support the best possible standard of living reasonably available to them.

For ordinary Australians, retirement success should be measured simply: by the highest sustainable annual spending their super can support. Individual risk preferences, flexibility and bequests may shape people’s trade-offs, but they should not obscure the fundamental goal.

Seen through Penny’s eyes, it all feels surprisingly obvious.

Clarissa Horwood is a retirement writer who has worked alongside actuaries, advisers and retirement-income specialists through Apricot Actuaries, Jubilacion and Optimum Pensions. She now works with SCAN, a specialist actuarial service focused on helping advisers and institutions compare and assess retirement-income strategies.

First published in Retirement Magazine

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Enrolling the self-employed into workplace pensions is not a good idea

Posted on September 19, 2026 by henry tapper

 

Auto-enrolment is back under scrutiny with the DWP launching an inquiry into the subject. You can examine what bothers  them from this link.

Here are the terms of reference for us to comment to them on

  • To what extent do minimum AE contributions need to increase?
  • How should any contribution increase be shared between employers and workers?
  • What are the trade-offs for employers and workers between current needs and long-term savings? How might policy design help balance them?
  • What would be an appropriate timetable for any increases?
  • Is there also a case for reducing or removing the lower earnings limit on contributions and/or the earnings trigger for auto-enrolment?
  • To what extent are employers and the public persuaded of the need for contributions to increase?

It is interesting what doesn’t bother them. They do not seem very interested in the self-employed. I’ve received this note from a union pension officer.

I’m very concerned that the Pension Commission / DWP solution to poor retirement outcomes for the self-employed will be to automatically enrol them (somehow or other!) into DC pension schemes.

But this would be a disaster for most of them (there is no employer contribution and the tax incentive for basic rate payers is negligible) – most of them would be financially much worse off. From meetings I’ve had with NEST and others, I think there’s a failure to understand how the system would impact the self-employed (they just think that more pension contributions is automatically good).

I wrote the following article (for my boss to submit!) for Pensions Expert. (It proposes a state solution or a product with the same tax treatment as a Lifetime ISA – tbh a CDC solution also seems possible / better!). I’m just trying to get this message across to policymakers.

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BlackRock publish their Case for CDC

Posted on September 18, 2026 by henry tapper

I stuffed a thick brochure into my rucksack. It claimed to be the Case for CDC at the PensionsAge show yesterday. I’d just seen Sophie Dapin and Christian Hyldahl explaining Europe’s commitment to collection.

This week the Pension Commission has been in Netherlands, next week they’ll be in Denmark. Christian Hyldahl is Danish and couldn’t have been more topical for us in the UK.

where

I read it in the hour it took me to get back home and I realised it was the first time that a study from an investment point of view of why CDC pays more – has been published.

Thanks BlackRock

The report is subtitled “understanding the investment implications of Collective Defined Contribution Schemes”. I warmly recommend it – as I’ve said before on this blog, BlackRock are putting a lot of effort into promoting their understanding.

This morning this promotion of the Case for CDC from BlackRock appeared on my timeline, I have no hesitancy in bringing it to all our attention.

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PensionsAge offered a day discussing CDC collective pensions

Posted on September 18, 2026 by henry tapper

I came away from the Waldorf in the Aldwych and walked over the Thames to Waterloo, my head full of what I’d heard and engaged with at the PensionsAge Autumn Conference.

Session after session featured a discussion of CDC. This could not have been thought possible a year ago. I remember sitting in this room 10 years ago listening to David Pitt-Watson saying what has been now enacted and has and is being built. More important to its success in 2027, is that it is what yesterday’s audience were asking about.

Let’s start with Helen Bell, who talked of Master Trusts becoming CDC schemes or adding R-CDC as their decumulation option.

Let’s move to the Danish Christian Hyldahl and Sophie Dapin, talking to us about European CDC and discussing , from BlackRock’s viewpoint, how CDC would develop in the UK. Let’s end the morning with the charming Monty Hadadi telling us about how he turned from internal auditor to Head of Pensions at one of the largest employers we have (First Bus). He thought he’d got away from CDC until a member of the audience asked him what he thought of it. He couldn’t hold back, he launched a torrent of praise for it and the opportunities it gave to schemes like his.

Lunchtime was spent talking with delegates – trustees , employers and providers about collective pensions and the demand for them. It was like another country to the one I attended the last PensionsAge conference in the same hall a year ago.

Move into the afternoon and I asked the British Business Bank whether they’d consider making it a condition of lending to or investing in companies on condition they upgraded their pensions. I may have caught Ian Connatty a little off his guard but I hope that we can follow up! Steve Charlton spoke for the smaller master trust struggling for scale but dominating the master trusts in terms of returns to members.

SEI’s the small ball at the top ,the larger balls stuck below the line!

The lady sat beside me , asked me whether CDC schemes suffer with a requirement to scale up by 2030. I replied they didn’t. She asked why SEI Master Trust did not convert to CDC.

CDC is not going to take pensions over, at least not yet. Helen Ball had kicked off the Conference by saying that 2027 would be a big year for pensions and she is right, it is the time when Church of England launches its CDC scheme and when the challenger schemes, Arboreum, Pensions Mutual and TPT start taking business. I wouldn’t have believed that CDC would have taken such a hold.

Thanks to PensionsAge for a great day. People stayed to the very end to hear each speaker and it wasn’t just for the M&S card that we did.

 

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