Hello all, happy Wednesday and welcome to your Update, which will be a mercifully brief affair as we are currently in the process of finalising Everything for HomeGame 6 at Leith Theatre next week. This is full on and stressful, especially for everyone else in the team, and I want to make sure I’m not overworked so I can be there to offer encouraging words as they pull yet another late shift. I am nothing if not a Lovely Boss.
I’ve said this before, but the scourge of the event organiser is those who just don’t bother turning up on the day; yes, there are emergencies in life but I’m going to go out there on a limb and suggest that most things aren’t really. So if you’ve got a ticket for HG6 and you don’t want it, gaunnae let us know? Odds on we’ve got someone who can take it. For the rest of you, it’s still worth checking the website if you think a live action AI financial advice lab experiment with a few hundred people plus a keynote from rugby super-ref Hollie Davidson is something you’d enjoy.
On top of that, tomorrow we will be launching the first paper of The Advice Gap 2026, sponsored by Saturn, which Mike took you through so eloquently last week. Eyes peeled. So there’s a lot going on.
However! Not as much for us, I’ll wager, as for young Andy Burnham. There will be no shortage of headlines about triple locks ending, care commissions being established and electoral reforms being pondered. It strikes me, as I watch the coverage pile up, that the more our sector tries to plug that advice gap, the closer we get to people for whom state provision is the bedrock of their later life finances; not a deferred DB scheme or a second property or a well-funded SIPP.
La démographie, c’est le destin, as my mate Auguste Comte almost certainly didn’t say to me over a pastis in 1845. But Paul Johnson of the IFS has already opened a can of whup-ass (warning: opens Twitter) on the idea that removing one leg of the triple-lock stool – I think that’s how they put it – will pay for a national care service in any meaningful way. How far away can means-testing the basic state pension be?
Anyway, I’m not a politician and there’s a reason that’s true. Without spoiling the treats in store from the Advice Gap research, when you read it you’ll see some interesting stats about why people don’t seek advice even if they can afford to do so, and for about a quarter of them it’s because they feel they’re confident in self-managing their financial affairs. In a febrile environment where planners can’t possibly predict where the financial lives of their clients will end up – but who have the skills to make plans that can be easily altered – I can’t imagine having that level of self-confidence.
All in all, it’s a hell of a week to be having a conference and launching a major study. Screw it. Nothing to be done. Here we go.
And your music choice? Well, this weekend I will drop my 18 year old daughter at university for the first time, and while I won’t miss the mess, I will miss her very much. Some kind of serendipity, then, that folk titans Breabach have just dropped their new song, Blàth na Bealtainne. That means May Flower in Gaelic, and it’s all about the bond between dads and daughters. No, you’re crying. Anyway, it’s a lovely thing.
