Explore every episode of the podcast People’s Pensions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s conference season. A busy time fore those wanting to bend politicians’ ears about the way forward for the pensions industry.

Our very own pensions guru Phil Brown has been doing the rounds – and more often than not he’s bumped into Nigel Peaple from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association.

So ahead of the PLSA’s very own conference, Phil met up with Nigel to hear what he’s been lobbying about. They also discussed the mood of the Conservative and Labour conferences as we head towards a general election year.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple measure of whether a pension scheme was worth investing in? It’s not just a case of which scheme charges the least. Quality of service is also important and so is the performance of investments.

All this is the aim of the Value For Money framework. The government hopes the VFM measure will help those running pension schemes to improve, encouraging competition and driving under-performing schemes from the market.

Which all sounds like good news. But coming up with the right way to measure VFM is a hot topic. Which is why Phil Brown met up with Darren Philp, policy expert and self-confessed pension geek.

One of the side-effects of automatic enrolment has been the creation of millions of small, ‘deferred’ pension pots scattered across the pensions landscape. With the average person working more than 10 jobs in a lifetime, this problem is only going to get bigger – much bigger.

In the recent Mansion House reforms, the government asked for responses on its initial plan. It’s opted for the multiple consolidators model – where small pots could be automatically transferred into large approved schemes. The government plans to set up a delivery group by the end of the year.

How might all this work….and is it good news for savers?

Here’s Phil Brown with his panel of expert - Zoe Alexander, director of strategy and corporate affairs at Nest; Lizzy Holliday, director of public affairs and policy at NOW:; Ian Digby, director of policy and regulation at Smart Pension and Sarah Luheshi, the deputy director at Pensions Policy Institute.

Spare a thought for people working in the pensions industry as they try to digest not one, but ten policy documents from the government, all released at the same time.

On our last podcast we discussed some of the main ideas of the Mansion House reforms - merging smaller funds, securing better value for money for members, and investing more in UK business.

Phil’s back with Tom McPhail and Charlotte Moore to examine three papers we didn’t touch last time.

First, we have CDCs - a new alternative to traditional pension schemes where savings are all pooled into a collective fund.

Second – is there a future for DB superfunds, championed by the Tony Blair Institute?

And finally – should there be consolidation in the Local Government Pension Scheme, which has 6 million members in 86 separate funds….

It’s been a big week for the pensions industry with the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s speech at the Mansion House.

The Mansion House reforms are aimed at getting more money from pension funds into high growth companies. He says this could unlock 50 billion pounds into private equities and early-stage businesses.

Jeremy Hunt also spoke about the government’s wish to merge smaller inefficient funds and he reminded everyone that any investments should be in the best interests of the ordinary people contributing to pension fund.

So, is this a revolution or a damp squib? Here’s Phil Brown and his two expert guests - pensions and investments specialist Charlotte Moore, and leading pensions expert and media commentator Tom McPhail.

Pension providers always need to be on the lookout for the best way to invest their members’ money. Pick the right investments, and people will get larger pension pots when they come to retire. Of course, get it wrong, and the opposite happens.

Well, there’s a new industry which wants to attract more investment from pension funds - the life sciences industry – that’s the industry which comes up with new drugs to keep us healthy and which proved its worth during the Covid pandemic.

The UK has a great track record of coming up with ideas, but there’s a lack of financial backing, forcing start-up companies to go abroad.

Today Phil Brown talks to a life science expert Dr Dan Mahony, to ask whether pension providers are letting down UK life science companies by being too slow to get onboard.

Have you heard about anchoring bias or loss aversion?

They’re two concepts from the world of behavioural science. In a nutshell, it means that you can influence people’s decisions without them even knowing it. Which is why many businesses are using those insights to get people to do things they want them to do.

On the podcast today Phil Brown will be hearing how pensions providers could learn a thing or two. Like how to subtly persuade people to put more into their pension pots.

He’s joined by a real expert in the field…Elizabeth Costa, the Managing Director of the Behavioural Insights Team in the UK.

(Oh, and by the way…when we say she’s an expert - that means sub-consciously, you trust her more!)

Imagine a world where people would be able to look at their pensions and see whether their provider was giving them good value for money. They’d be able to compare that value for money with other schemes. It might make them switch investments. It would certainly be a wake-up call for schemes which were not scoring well.

That’s a vision the government is aspiring to. A consultation on how to get there has recently closed and we’re awaiting its conclusions.

But how should you measure value for money? Should low costs be more important than good investment returns? Getting the metrics right is going to be a complicated job.

Casting his eye over the consultation is Phil Brown, today joined by Joe Dabrowski, the deputy director of policy at the Pension Lifetime Savings Association, and Rob Yuille, Assistant Director, head of long-term savings policy at the Association of British Insurers.

Raising the state pension age has been a hot topic this year. In France it’s led to riots. Back in the UK we’ve learned that there will be no announcement on raising the state pension age until after the next general election.

At the moment the age is 66. But if you were born after April 1960, you won’t get your state pension until you turn 67. And if you were born after April 1977 – you’ll be the first to have to wait till you’re 68.

But are those figures fair? Do we need to review the dates…and what about being more radical – like an earlier state pension age for people who have worked in physically demanding jobs?

Plenty for Phil Brown to discuss with Jo Cumbo, the Global Pensions Correspondent at the FT and Alyshia Harrington-Clark, Head of DC, Master Trusts and Lifetime Savings at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA).

On this podcast, Phil Brown and his guests will be looking at the volatility in investment markets, and what that means for pensions.

A global pandemic, a war in Europe, soaring energy costs and a cost-of-living crisis - it’s a bewildering time for those making pension choices.

Phil’s joined by Alistair Byrne, Head of Retirement Strategy at State Street Global Advisors and journalist Mona Dohle, a specialist in investment at news outlets Room151 and Net Zero Investor.

The UK pensions industry needs a comprehensive review to meet the needs of people currently in work – that’s the view of the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The IFS has just published a report which says that while current pensioners are doing better than ever before, the future for generations to come is not so rosy.

Many workers are saving little for retirement - particularly those in self-employment. And there are worries about the future cost of rented housing.

They say it’s time for policy makers to take a fresh look at the system. Phil Brown catches up with one of the report's authors, Jonathan Cribb – Head of Retirement, Savings and Ageing at the IFS.

Recent research suggests 9 in 10 of us have experienced malicious attempts to get hold of our pensions savings.

Today Phil Brown is joined by Dr Rick Muir, who helped the People’s Partnership with research into the problem - and Margret Snowdon, Chair of the Pension Scams Industry Group.

So, is scamming getting worse? And what are the implications for legitimate pensions providers who use incentives to encourage customers to transfer their money?  

The Chancellor’s announcements on pensions in the Spring Budget have been branded as the ‘Most critical changes to pensions in a decade’. The big surprise was Jeremy Hunt’s move to scrap the lifetime allowance on pension pots in a bid to stem the wave of early retirement – but is it the right move?

And could the introduction of 30 free hours of childcare for children from 9 months help reduce the Gender Pensions Gap?

Phil takes a look at the impact the Spring Budget could have on savers with the help of Lauren Wilkinson from the Pensions Policy Institute and Simoney Kyriakou from the FT Adviser.

To mark International Women’s Day we’re putting the gender pension gap under the microscope.

The gender pensions gap – the inequality between men and women’s pensions – is more than double the size of the total gender pay gap, with the average female pensioner £7,000 a year poorer than her male counterpart.

Pensions journalist Sara Benwell and Sarah Luheshi from the Pensions Policy Institute join Phil Brown to explore why that pensions gap is so big and what can be done to close it.

It was one of the most significant changes in the pensions landscape.

In 2012 the government brought in auto enrolment, aiming to get more people to save for retirement. And it worked.

10 years on, more than 10 million people have started saving.

But can the system be improved? Phil Brown talks to Baroness Jeannie Drake - one of the architects of the scheme.

That was the year that was. 2022 saw a huge number of changes to the pensions landscape.

We saw a move towards the Pensions Dashboard, allowing people to see what they have in their various pensions in a single place online. There’s the Value for Money initiative which aims to make it easier for savers to compare different schemes.

But that’s just for starters. Phil Brown and pundit Tom McPhail help you catch up on a turbulent year of change.

Millions more people are putting money into a pension since the start of auto-enrolment – that’s the good news. The bad news is that many people aren’t saving enough to give them the retirement they want.

People’s Partnership research shows that more than half of savers are failing to meet pensions targets. So, what’s the answer? Phil Brown tracked down Stephen Timms MP - chair of the Work and Pensions Committee.

Ask most people about their pensions and you might get a blank look. Pensions can be complicated, especially for those who move between jobs.

2022 saw the first ever pensions engagement season, a campaign to explain and educate savers so that they can make informed decisions about their retirement income. This year the campaign continues.

Phil Brown finds out how pension providers should approach the issue.