What does the change of name to People’s Partnership mean for scheme members?
At the moment we are focused on pension how we help members of The People’s Pension to and through retirement. We are launching a retirement planning tool to help people plan how to draw their benefits. We are also developing our options at retirement. We’ve already increased flexibility around how you can take your pension, and we have more changes that will come through later.
Why are you changing the name of the parent organisation from B&CE to People’s Partnership?
B&CE originated in construction, supporting construction workers, and we have done a lot to bring pensions and life cover to them, things working people didn’t get access to. We have been on a journey with TPP that what we do in construction aligns to everyone, that need for those essential products for life’s journey. But this is more than a name change – it’s about the organisation declaring intent behind the brand. We are here for everyone. We have gone through a lot of changes internally, and we are an organisation that can serve everyone.
How are you adapting to the future world of tech?
The dashboards rollout is going to change the world. The planner we are delivering is designed to support that. Pensions dashboards should be an enormous change for the sector that should be revolutionary.
Do you have concerns about the dashboards rollout?
Yes, I am concern at some of the timings –there are bits of the technical specification that are not locked down. So my concern is we may end up with a bit of a misfire. It has been a bit slow coming out.
The data standards have also been slow to come out – one of the issues for me is they are allowing schemes to decide at what level they present the data. It seems to be left to schemes to decide what level of certainty they give in the data they submit. This makes sense on the one hand because the liability sits with the scheme [to ensure the data is correct] but it allows you to game the request. So some providers may respond by saying ‘we might have a match for you, please contact us’. If we had the same standard, we could present the data in a consistent way.
Are you concerned at bad outcomes resulting from transfers that could result from the arrival of dashboards?
The big issue is the fact that we are opening this up to commerciality, but we are unclear about what protections are going to be in place. We see already with transfers the blurring of the lines between workplace and retail pensions. And people are being asked to move, on the basis that the old scheme is a dusty old non-competitive thing, when often that is not the case because of the price cap. When considering the motivation to transfer, I would doubt whether price or investment return is in people’s top five criteria. This means the VFM work the DWP and FCA do is really important.
Are you considering a collective DC (CDC) arrangement for The People’s Pension?
We are watching CDC with interest but I don’t want people to think we are actively looking at this space.