Member

What is the Government’s response to all this in the Bill? It is hundreds of pages of extra regulations, guidance and expense, all absurdly complicated, costing money, causing delay and adding risk, which in turn undermines confidence in the system. It treats the closest thing we have to a sovereign wealth fund in the LGPS as a ministerial plaything. Its more than 160 pages make pensions so complicated and opaque that they make the point that it is not really for me. I think it is a real problem. It is giving more powers to Whitehall, Marsham Street and the cat’s-cradle of group-thinking regulators and emblematically preventing innovation with a default scheme that requires the regulator to approve a new entrant—the old boys’ network keeping out a competitor. It provides insurmountable hurdles to these new entrants while doing nothing to stop the insanity that drives private schemes to liability-driven investments that force trustees not to maximise returns but instead to anchor themselves in deficits. An absurd regulatory mania drives people into these absurdly leveraged products. All this leads to poorer outcomes in retirement and damages trust and confidence in a pension system that is already on shaky ground.