Member

Here, the Government’s position on mandation becomes rather difficult to reconcile. Automatic enrolment default savers are, by design, those who have not made an active investment choice. They are disproportionately lower and middle-income earners, often disengaged not through indifference but simply through constraint. They rely more heavily than any other group on trustees, on regulators and on the integrity of the system itself to act on their behalf, yet it is precisely these funds that the Government have chosen as the vehicle for mandation. That raises a simple but unavoidable question of principle: if fiduciary duty exists to protect those who are the least well off, why are mandation powers being applied in a way that concentrates risk on that very group? The risks of that direction fall not on those best able to bear them but on those least able to respond.