Look Where You're Going by Paddy Briggs

Author:Paddy Briggs [Paddy Briggs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903946
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

The world of pensions – in part a subset of the financial services sector and in part, at the time, a component of companies’ compensation packages – can be confusing to the onlooker. There are many interests at stake and they do not necessarily all seek similar outcomes. This was recognised in the creation of a ‘joint occupational working group’ comprising, along with the NAPF, the Association of Consulting Actuaries, the Association of British Insurers, the Association of Pensions Lawyers and the Society of Pensions Consultants. The group had access to government departments – primarily the Department of Work and Pensions. Along with his NAPF responsibilities Alan Pickering was asked to be chairman of this working group – a role in which, according to Adrian Waddingham, he was ‘very effective’, having gained ‘100 per cent support’ from the group’s participants. He says that across the group there was unanimity that ‘politicians were killing the pensions goose through over-prescription and over-regulation’. The conventional wisdom of the times was that the damaging outcomes of the changes made in the 1995 act were ‘unintended consequences of a well-intentioned development’. Alan Pickering rejects this; the consequences may have been unintended, but they were based on what he calls ‘lousy decision-making’.

As chairman of the NAPF, Alan Pickering was to have regular platforms at conferences and elsewhere to speak his mind – as well as direct access to politicians and civil servants. He wanted, as a minimum, to try to ensure ‘the government’s pensions proposals don’t damage that part of the system that is working well’.34 It was a role he relished. There was some campaigning zeal here as well: ‘The problem in Britain is under-provision, not over-provision, and we shouldn’t be discouraging people from making as much advance provision as they can.’35 On taking office he said in an interview for Pensions Week36 that his priority was developing ‘a close relationship between the NAPF centrally and our members. Our greatest failing is not telling our members what we’re doing.’ He also emphasised the ‘need to ensure that the relationship with the government is productive … the NAPF already has a good working relationship with the Department of Social Security … [we] want to develop a similar relationship with the Treasury.’ In the same interview he also appeared cautious about what was the Blair government’s idea of ‘stakeholder pensions’:37 ‘My real fear’, he said, ‘is that stakeholder pensions will crowd out other forms of pensions provisions that might have been better. It may result in a “dumbing down” of pensions.’ This echoes the views of his predecessor as NAPF chairman, Peter Murray, who was to state at the NAPF annual conference in 1999, ‘Our view is that one major effect of the [stakeholder pension] proposals will be to undermine occupational pension provision in the UK. Employers will feel it is easier and more cost-effective to offer access to a stakeholder pension that an occupational scheme for their employees.’

That Alan Pickering was going to lead a pragmatic charge at the NAPF was clear in another interview he gave on becoming chairman.

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