I attended the launch of the OECD’s 2024 edition of Pensions Outlook today, kindly hosted by Standard Life at Barings.
One of the key themes of this year’s report is inclusivity, as in – how do we ensure all working people are included in quality pension savings? The OECD concludes that multi-employer schemes can play a key role in ensuring that employer type and size does not determine the quality (or size) of the pension scheme that a person saves in.
That’s good news for the UK as we are on a path towards fewer, larger schemes, which is likely to result in most of these being multi-employer (as how else can you easily achieve the required scale?)
Great! It night be a rocky road, pensions has been extremely chaotic lately! But a path to more inclusivity sounds like it must be a good thing. The OECD does warn though, that we can’t forget about the self-employed.
What I am keen to know though is how we ensure genuine inclusivity? Tackling employer size is a great start but what about the women and ethnic minorities, disabled people and carers who are much more likely to work part time, be self-employed, unemployed or work casual jobs? We talk a lot about the gender pensions gap and we talk less than we should about the ethnicity pensions gap . The Pensions Policy Institute produce a brilliant (award winning) annual report about pension differences for women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and carers, but where are the policy proposals by Government for tackling these inequalities?
You might say “hey! Pensions Goth! Wait till the Government’s current pensions review is over!” Okay, I’m waiting, but I can’t help but notice that while a raft of recent policies have come out to improve things like Value for Money and scale in pensions, and we are now (finally) looking at adequacy in the pensions review – this is an area relatively untouched and unremarked on by Government. Surely, pension outcomes for disadvantaged people will be considered as part of a review of adequacy?
If not, I think we really need to promote more discussion of how we ensure that a push for more inclusivity really results in actual inclusivity, for all of our working-age people and future pensioners.
Leave a Reply