Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve been in charge of the Update. By the time you read this, Mark P will finally be back from holiday, but after 38 weeks off he needs a few days to reacclimatise and deal with 11 billion emails. Normal service should resume next week.
I’m starting with a bit of shameless self-promotion (sorry not sorry). Last Wednesday we won PR Agency of the Year at the HeadlineMoney Awards.
I’m not going to go all Gwyneth Paltrow on you, but this is a really big deal. The lang cat grew from a small platform consultancy and we’re still probably best known for the financial services research and insight side of the business. But the PR, comms and public affairs team is now 11 strong and we work with an amazing range of clients across traditional PR, content, marketing communications and public affairs. This award really shows how far we’ve come and how far we can go. Mark Locke wrote a brilliant post last week summing up how we all feel, and I just want to add my heartfelt thanks to everyone who voted for us.
The HLM awards coincided with Mark P’s birthday, which I’m sure helped take the edge off getting another year older. I’m hurtling toward a BIG birthday myself next month. I’d just about made my peace with being old, but after working on a project around retirement income with one of my clients (more on that coming soon), I’ve gone off the whole idea of ageing.
Decisions around making your money last for a 20-30 year retirement can be really hard. With people living longer, the decline of DB schemes and the fact that nearly two-fifths of pots enter drawdown without taking advice or guidance, the danger of people running out of money too early is all too real. Only yesterday, Scottish Widows warned that millions of people are not on track for a minimum standard of living in retirement.
Clearly, the government’s promised pensions review can’t come soon enough. At the weekend, the Chancellor launched the first phase, focusing on investment. She announced that phase two, starting later this year, “will consider further steps to improve pension outcomes… including assessing retirement adequacy.”
So it’ll take a bit longer for any actual proposals to emerge from the review, and longer still to see new legislation put in place to help make sure people have a sustainable income and comfortable lifestyle in retirement. There have been plenty of previous initiatives aimed at improving retirement income decisions, but here we are still looking for solutions. Could this time be different?
The fact that the review will be led by the Pensions Minister, a role which spans both the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions for the first time, hopefully points to the two departments working more closely together at the very least. The official announcement of the review also includes a whole host of comments from pension providers, banks, insurers and industry bodies supporting the process.
Industry engagement will be important for the success of any resulting initiatives, so the starting point seems promising from that perspective. However, as my colleague Alison Gay on our regulatory and public affairs team points out, “There’s no input from consumer groups, or even, given that it’s a Labour government, from the unions, which seems to be a bit of a missed opportunity.”
We’ll have to wait and see what that means for the shape of future pension policy.
To the music choice. For my last birthday, my husband promised me tickets to ABBA Voyage and we’ve just got around to booking it up for this weekend, so I’m sharing the joy with Dancing Queen.
