People’s Pensions

The Cash Incentive Experiment

It’s not hard to find adverts these days, trying to get you to transfer your pension pot to a different provider. Many of those ads feature cash incentives to try to persuade savers to move their money.
The People’s Partnership, which runs The People’s Pension, wanted to test how people responded to adverts like that, and whether the promise of £100 might get people to swap providers. Would they bother researching whether such a move would be detrimental in the long run?
The results were fascinating. In this episode Phil Brown meets Ruth Persian from the Behavioural Insights Team to talk about what they discovered.

New Choices, Big Decisions

Back in 2015 people were given a whole load of new choices about their DC pensions for the first time. Whether to take a cash free sum and what to do with the other 75% of their pot.
The People’s Pension and State Street Global Advisors came together to follow a group of older workers as they started making those choices and the great thing about this study is that those people have been followed as they’ve gone into retirement.
Now the latest snapshot of their lives has been gathered….9 years on. So, what does it say about their choices, have their priorities changed and what can the pensions industry learn from this insight?
Phil Brown has been talking to Alistair Byrne Head of Retirement Strategy at State Street Global Advisors and Janette Weir, who has conducted the research over the past nine years.

Pension fees - why most savers are in the dark

There’s been a real buzz in the pensions world following research by People’s Partnership – who provide the People’s Pension.
The research suggested that people could be left more than £70,000 poorer in retirement because they don’t understand charges when transferring their pension.
Many people who’ve recently transferred didn’t know what fees applied to their old pensions or the new one they’d signed up to. And that lack of transparency might leave them out of pocket in the long run.
So, should charges be more transparent, and how should regulators react to this new evidence?
Phil Brown’s guests are Patrick Heath-Lay from People’s Partnership who commissioned the study and Janette Weir of Ignition House who carried it out.

CDC Pension Schemes - are they the way forward?

This time on the People’s Pensions podcast – we’re talking about the new kid on the pensions block. Collective Defined Contribution Pension schemes – CDC.
Similar schemes have been used in Canada and the Netherlands – they were introduced here in the 2021 Pension Act and the Royal Mail is the only scheme which has been authorised at the moment.
CDC is a pooled risk plan – the choice of investment is made by professionals and it gives members security of a pension income for life.
Today Phil Brown is talking to Rob Yuille and Maria Busca from the ABI who have been doing research into whether CDC is the way forward.

2024 - A preview of the year ahead for pensions

Happy New Year to all the People’s Pension Podcast listeners. But what sort of 2024 have we got in store? How will the reforms of the pension industry fare in what’s likely to be a general election year?
Will pensions feature in party manifestos?... And what would a change of government mean for consolidating the pensions market, value for money and even the triple lock?
Time to get out our trusty People’s Pension crystal ball. Phil Brown is in charge, as usual, alongside leading pensions expert and media commentator Tom McPhail, the director of public affairs at Langcat along with pensions and investments specialist, Charlotte Moore.

Review of 2023 - a busy year for pension policy

So, it’s time to look back on the pensions landscape after a year of big policy announcements and consultations. A lot has happened in 2023, in particular the Mansion House reforms and the Autumn Statement that followed.
The government wants to consolidate the marketplace and get pension funds to invest more in the UK to stimulate the economy.
Time for a stock-check of where we are now. Phil Brown enlisted the help of leading pensions expert and media commentator Tom McPhail, the director of public affairs at Langcat - along with pensions and investments specialist, Charlotte Moore.

Educating children about money matters

On this podcast, we often talk about how members of pension schemes aren’t really engaged with their savings. Sometimes it’s because they find the financial world so confusing.
So how about this for an idea… a book, aimed at small children, teaching them how to look after their money.
It’s been written by Sonia Rach, a journalist at the FT Adviser. Phil Brown caught up with Sonia to talk about the book and about how we get young people to start thinking about money matters.

Autumn Statement 2023 - what it means for pensions

All the news ahead of the chancellor’s autumn statement was about potential tax cuts, but in the wake of the Mansion House reforms, many inside the pensions industry were interested to hear the government’s latest thinking.
As expected, the government says it will stand by the state pension triple lock in full, with pensioners receiving an 8.5 per cent increase from April 2024.
However, much of the detail was about consolidating the pensions industry. With a consultation on giving workers a 'pension pot for life' instead of being forced into an employer-chosen scheme.
Here to guide us through the details is Phil Brown and his guests, Gregg McClymont, a former shadow Labour pensions minister who is now with Australian pension funds owned infrastructure investor, IFM and Tim Gosling, Head of Policy at People’s Partnership.

Pay your pension some attention!

The pensions industry’s been working hard on public engagement in recent years.
The first Pensions Engagement Season in 2022 used rapper Big Zuu as its poster boy in a bid to make people sit up and listen and ‘pay their pensions some attention’.
The second Pensions Engagement Season has just taken place – and we wanted to find out if the campaign is striking the right note. Is it having an impact?
Phil Brown’s been speaking to two people behind it: Hetty Hughes from the Association of British Insurers and Joe Dabrowski from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association.

Expanding Auto Enrolment - with Phil Brown and Baroness Ros Altmann

On today’s podcast we’re talking about the expansion of auto enrolment. Auto enrolment was first introduced in 2012 and since then has transformed UK pension saving with nearly 11 million people enrolled.
Now a Private Members’ Bill has successfully passed through parliament, reducing the age when auto enrolment can start and enabling pension saving to begin from someone’s very first job.
The Bill was taken through the House of Lords by Baroness Ros Altmann. Phil Brown has been talking to her about the impact of the changes.