Pension Plan Charges

David Mowat Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) on leading the charge. During his remarks, he distinguished between the need for transparency and the absolute cost. I contend—I will talk a bit about the absolute cost—that there has been a market failure in the UK pensions industry over the past two decades. That market failure is having a significant impact on the private sector propensity to save. Fewer than half of people working in the private sector now contribute to a pension fund. Transparency and cost are symptoms of the market failure.

To give some numbers, the Financial Services Authority estimated this month that some 31% of private sector pension pots go to fees. That is not surprising, because fees are, roughly speaking, 1.5% to 2%. Most pension funds aim for retail prices index plus 3.5% to 4%, so 50% of the real return is budgeted to go in fees. When things are difficult, as they have been over the past couple of years, the reality is that the figures are much worse, and absolute returns fall.

The real issue is that the private pensions industry is massively subsidised, and it would be hard to find an industry in the UK that is subsidised to the same extent. The Government pays something in the order of £40 billion a year into the industry to keep it going in the way that it has come to expect.

As I said, we have a chronic market failure, which has a number of unpleasant consequences, and I want to explore a little how that market failure has arisen. Principally, it is an issue of complexity; we have complete asymmetry of information between pension fund users and the funds themselves, and my hon. Friend gave a number of the excellent examples.

The consequence is that a whole industry of financial advisers has grown up to act as an intermediary between these complex pension funds and the average employee or punter. The difficulty, of course, is that the commission structure that was put in place has seriously compromised financial advisers’ independence. I congratulate the previous Government on what they did on the retail distribution review, and I hope this Government will push forward quickly to introduce it, because it is one of the things that must happen.

This market failure has also been caused by barriers to entry, which are a classic reason for market failure. Funds can charge fees of 1.5%, 2% or more in some cases because new entrants are not coming into the market with the velocity that we would expect. That, too, is to do with the industry’s structure, and it is for the Government to encourage changes. When I was reflecting on the debate this morning, I looked at one platform and found 5,000 funds were available to me. They were provided by something like 45 different suppliers. The industry has not consolidated, because it has not been forced to and it is not subject to commercial pressure. The consequence is that fees have been too high, with all that that means for the private sector take-up of schemes.

At the heart of this issue is a lack of transparency. Transparency can mean different things at different times, but there is a lack of understanding and comparability. Let me mention a number of the different charges that I know of, although there may be many others. There are annual charges, entrance charges and exit charges. A new one, which a number of companies are using, relates to churn. The average pension fund—this is an extraordinary statistic—has a churn rate of 128%, which means that it turns over the equities that it invests in by 128% in one year. That generates charges and income, and all that goes with that. Warren Buffett advises people to spend 10 to 15 years in an equity, and it is not clear why pension funds are churning to the extent they are, unless that is to generate revenue for themselves.

There is the new platform charge, but I will not go into that, given the time. I have not even talked about the way the charge structure for annuities works or the degree to which annuity advice is independent. The new super-charge has also come in. Companies are trying to get this trailing charge through before the RDR comes in, which is why we need to push ahead with it. Advisers are signed up for a trailing fee for many years into the future on the basis that they continue to have some kind of contact with the punter, even though about 50% or 60% of them never see the punter again. It is very difficult to bring transparency into such a charging structure and to provide for comparability, but we must try.

What are the consequences of this market failure? We can look at that in three ways: the consequences for the industry, the punter and the Government. This morning, I looked at Hargreaves Lansdown, which has about 500 employees, and the mean salary for one of its directors is £1.5 million per annum—nice business if you can get it.

What does market failure mean for the consumer? We have talked a little about that. Over the past 15 years, the average consumer in a private sector pension fund has had a return of 4.2% per annum. Broadly speaking, that is a bit better than the yield in the FTSE—that is the sort of return that consumers have managed to achieve after charges.

The consequence is that there is a massive lack of confidence in the pension industry. I know a lot of people who know that they should invest for the future and that they should put money aside, although they are in their 40s or 50s, so it is possibly too late. They do not do so, however, because they mistrust the industry. The fact that there is tax relief and that a lot of this money is free is lost because there is such distrust towards the industry, and I am not sure that people are totally wrong to feel like that.

The recent report from Lord McFall said that the median pension pot for a private sector person in their 40s or 50s is £35,000, which translates, even if built up, into a pension of less than £2,000 a year. Those are the consequences for the punter of this market failure, which has been caused by the lack of transparency.

The consequences for the Government are also pretty serious. We are getting an under-pensioned populace, despite the fact the Government are subsidising the industry to the tune of £30 billion to £40 billion per annum. Superimposed on that is the honest attempt to fix the problem with pensioning through the auto-enrolment scheme. However, that will actually result in a further subsidy and a further inflow of funds to the industry. Unless, it comes at the same time as reform, we will continue to see the current market abuse.

What should the Government do? We have talked about the need for simplification. As I listened to my hon. Friend’s examples, I was reminded of the debate we had in the main Chamber about the energy companies and the need for transparency on energy tariffs. We heard that it was not possible properly to compare energy tariffs because they were so complex, so people did not know when and when not to switch. Frankly, the situation before us is analogous, but arguably more serious, because the amounts of money involved are much greater.

My hon. Friend gave us some sensible ideas about simplification, and the Government should think hard about them. There must be a way of doing things more simply. The Government might wish to look at the experience in other European countries, because there are better markets and rates are lower in many of them.

I have talked about the need for the RDR to go ahead at speed. I would like to ensure that that happens and that the review is not delayed, as it has occasionally been rumoured to be.

The Government should think hard about a cap for the pension funds that are permitted to be part of the NEST system. Under the stakeholder pension brought in by the previous Government, there was a cap of 1%, with a cap of 1.5% in the medium term, and that is probably justified. When an industry is not operating in a free market because it is as heavily subsidised, as this one is, it is reasonable for the Government to think in those terms. Indeed, this does not sound like a very free-market solution, but most of the people who join auto-enrolment will need a very simple tracker fund based on the FTSE, and there are all sorts of ways that could be achieved. There are several funds in Europe with charges of the order of 0.08% for a thing like that, and I think that the Government might want to think about different ways to achieve it.

I have not talked much about annuities, but the problem with respect to the market failure in annuities is that 75% of people who purchase them buy them from their pension provider. There may not be anything wrong with that, if it is the best deal, but the truth is that there is a huge difference between good and bad annuity rates. The Government should require pension advisers to ensure that at least three different quotations are given before a customer can take an annuity from the provider.

I want to touch briefly on one other final cause of the market failure. I am a trustee of the House of Commons pension fund. It is clear to me as a trustee that there is a tendency to be quite conservative about things. The only downside for a trustee, in relation to the possibility of being in breach of trust, is the potential for doing something risky. Most pension funds should buy assets—buy shares—themselves. They should not do that through funds and lose 2%, but there is no incentive for trustees to act in that way. In fact, all the incentives are for them to act in the opposite way. I used to work in the IT industry, where people used to say, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM.” Trustees have a similar characteristic, and that is a contributory factor to the market failure that I have talked about, which is causing so much difficulty now.

The Government have a big issue to deal with—I shall not call it a scandal—to do with transparency and practices that it would be reasonable to call anti-competitive. The country is under-pensioned, which will cause severe problems in the next four decades. There is a need to look hard, as a matter of Government policy, at getting confidence and zeal back into the industry, so I wish the Minister well.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

There is a risk of an outbreak of violent agreement in this debate, but I will do my best to sow some dissent, if I can. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) on securing the debate. It is good to see a number of hon. Members present and happy to spend 90 minutes discussing transparency in pension fund charges. Although it may be thought of as a dry subject, it is, as we have heard from a number of contributors, fundamentally important to the pensions outcomes of so many of our constituents. I am, therefore, grateful not only to my hon. Friend for securing the debate, but to all hon. Members who have participated in thoughtful ways.

I was struck by my hon. Friend’s examples of baffling language. On the first pension I ever had, I remember having to choose whether I wanted it to be “with profits” or not. I thought, “Profits must be a good thing, so I’ll have one of them,” but I did not have a clue. I worked for the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the time, so I may have been thought to have a clue, but I had no idea what it was. In fact, I am still a little bit hazy about it, but I do not have it any more.

It is absolutely clear that. although people get information, it does not inform. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) said, although one can get a wodge of stuff that complies with all the necessary regulations, it might not actually communicate anything at all. I agree with her that financial literacy is an important part of the jigsaw. She may have been encouraged to hear the Prime Minister say at Prime Minister’s questions that he will look at the research the all-party group on financial education for young people is doing. There is clearly some momentum behind that campaign in the House, which I certainly welcome. However, I think she would be the first to admit that financial literacy is only part of the jigsaw.

One of the crucial things about pensions is that we need to make them work for people who do not engage. In other words, most people will find the subject boring or off-putting and we need to ensure that their interests are protected. A phrase in the behavioural economics and pensions lexicon is, “You can’t beat a good default.” That is significant in the context of auto-enrolment because, by the end of the process, we will take firms that are not interested and give them a legal duty to choose a pension. It will not be the employer’s pension; it will be the employee’s pension. Therefore, the firm may have a limited incentive. It may care about its workers, but there may be a limit to how far it wants to go.

As we have heard, there may be employers coming into auto-enrol that are less educated, less interested and less well informed. When we discussed these issues in the Committee that considered the Pensions Bill earlier this year, one hon. Member—I think it was the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans)—asked what happens when a man in a shiny suit turns up. For example, he might turn up at a small engineering firm in the west midlands that employs three people and that probably did not even know it had a legal duty to auto-enrol—we have done our best, but it may not have heard—and say, “You’ve got to do this thing. I can do a scheme. Here are the terms. Sign here.”

There might be a tendency for such a firm to go for that. The question then is: who is looking after the welfare of the employee, because the employee will almost certainly end up auto-enrolled into a default fund? We need to make sure that the employee, who may not be engaged with pensions either, is protected. Transparency is a part of that. Individuals must get the relevant material, so that they know what they are paying. However, the employer has chosen the scheme. Happily, we are still on the eve of auto-enrolment, so we need to make sure that, first and foremost, employers have transparency. When employers are establishing auto-enrolment schemes or choosing schemes that are already running, they will therefore know what they are choosing between in a simple and consistent way.

I very much welcome the work of the National Association of Pension Funds that has been cited by a number of hon. Members. I am delighted that it is bringing together industry players, such as the Association of British Insurers, many of whose members offer contract-based pensions. We are therefore getting a spread across the breadth of pension provision. If that group and that work can produce an effective industry code of practice on transparency on charges, so much the better. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth that, if the industry can sort its own house out—it has not done so yet and there is some recognition of that—it is far better than the Government trying to be over-prescriptive. We need to ensure that we can get to that point quickly. I am pretty sure that, if the ABI, the NAPF and others get their act together and sort it out, they can move a lot faster than the Government. If an industry code of practice is in place before auto-enrolment starts, that will be very positive.

A number of hon. Members referred to the important issues of active member discounts, deferred member charges and deferred member penalties. That is a good example of transparency, or the lack of it. Someone might have left a firm years ago and still have some money with it. As my hon. Friend said, they might receive a statement, but they probably do not understand it. It is not apparent what is happening on charges and it perhaps did not even occur to the person concerned that, now they have left the firm, the charges are higher than they were when they were with the firm. Again, transparency gets us only so far.

One of the things we as a Government need to do, particularly post auto-enrolment, is to look at the whole issue of transfers. As the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Gregg McClymont)—I discovered the other day that that is the longest constituency name in Parliament—said, people might typically have 11 different jobs and acquire multiple small pots during their lifetime.

We could just do transparency. We could make sure that people know what pots they have got and what charges they are paying. However, a better strategy in my view—or certainly a better first step—would be to consolidate all those small pots, so that people are not left with stranded pots that they might never access at all because the firm has lost touch with them. We know that that happens because we hear from pension fund trustees who cannot find their members anymore. I do not know, Mr Gale, whether when you have moved house, you have told all your pension providers of your new address, but many people fail to do so. Therefore, many people end up with stranded pension pots because the providers have lost contact with them or because the pots are so small one could not buy an annuity with them and the charges for transferring them out are so large as to not make it worth while.

One can start to see how individuals who are just the sort of people who might be under-pensioned will get a bad deal. Therefore, transparency takes us so far, but much more action on transfers could take us a lot further. Hon. Members will be encouraged to know that, very shortly, I hope that we will be publishing a document setting out some options on how we might make transfers work. It is code-named “project big fat pot.” The idea is that we bring together all the small pension pots people have. In an auto-enrolment world, that really matters because we estimate that hundreds of thousands of small pots could be created every year. Such pots belong to people who are auto-enrolled, leave the firm and move on. We need to ensure that that process of accumulation of pots is as systematic and automatic as possible.

We will set out options. I say to the shadow spokesman that we are very much in listening mode on this and that, if he has insights and thoughts on our consultation, we will be pleased to hear what they are and to meet him to discuss them. One option is that the pot should follow the person. So if someone changes jobs, by default, the new firm says, “Right, we’ve auto-enrolled you. You have just come from another scheme. Unless you tell us not to, we will take the money into the new scheme, so you consolidate into the new scheme.” That is quite attractive but, on the other hand, such an approach raises issues around member protection if someone goes from “a good scheme” to a “not so good scheme.”

An alternative option would be that, by default, small pots go to a third-party aggregator—a third-party pot. That could be the NEST, another provider, a multiple set of providers or a super-trust. There is a variety of options. Again, that will mean someone does not end up with stranded pots and deferred member charges; they will just end up with a big fat pension pot, as far as they can.

That brings me to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) about value for money. My rule of thumb on people buying annuities is that a third of people shop around and switch, a third of people shop around and stay with their provider, and a third of people do not shop around. If we can accumulate small pots into big ones, that will ensure people are getting better value for money and better annuity returns. However, he is absolutely right: transparency and information for people when they are making their annuity choices is vital and getting as close as we can to turning defaulting into shopping around has got to be the direction of travel.

The Association of British Insurers has taken some important steps in that direction recently. For example, if someone has saved with company A and, six months before they are due to draw their annuity, it contacts them, the ABI is making it a condition of membership of the ABI that the provider does not send the application form that is easy for someone to fill in and send back, meaning they end up with company A. Someone has to actively seek that out. That is a small step, but it is a step in the right direction.

We can do more and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury will be announcing further measures on that shortly. We need to ensure that people see what the charges are but, better yet, we need to try to ensure that people are not in a position where they face these charges. Instead, they should have the money somewhere they are connected to, rather than somewhere they left a long time ago. That would be an appropriate response.

There has been talk during the debate about NEST. It is encouraging that NEST has already driven up standards in the industry. In focusing on its target market, which includes people on lower incomes and people who have not been pensioned before, NEST has had to think very hard about language and communication. It has come up with a lexicon of phrases and the use of words such as “vesting” has been ruled out. That word cannot be used because nobody knows what it means. Unfortunately, the word “pension” is also a bit tricky as nobody knows what that means either. I think NEST calls a pension a retirement wage or something. I have a branding problem with my own job. I have asked the Prime Minister if I can be called the Minister for retirement solutions or something like that.

There is a serious issue surrounding the communication of pensions. NEST has led the field. Others are working with it and we, as a Department, have a working group on communications that involves a lot of the industry in trying to ensure that all of us are speaking human rather than pensions. That is vital in the context of auto-enrolment.

I do not know whether the shadow spokesman has had a chance to visit NEST yet, but we extend an invitation for him to do so. [Interruption.] Next week—there we go. My hon. Friends on the Select Committee visited and came back pretty impressed with what NEST is doing to drive up standards of communication, which is really important, and standards of transparency on charges, and to bring charges down.

I will say a word about the NEST charging structure in a second, but perhaps slightly contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South said, the evidence in the auto-enrolment space is that charges are coming down. He raised the issue of entrance to the market. We see growing competition—auto-enrolment is a big market; 10 million people will be auto-enrolled—new people coming in and charges coming down. For example, the B&CE organisation has branded itself as the “people’s pension”—I will not comment—with an annual management charge of 0.5%. NOW: Pensions, which is linked to the Danish providers, has a different structure at £1.50 a month, I believe, and a 0.3% charge. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth mentioned the Federation of Small Businesses, which I believe is coming in with charges below 1%. There is NEST. We have heard about Legal & General, obviously an existing provider, but one that is working proactively in the market. I am encouraged that, in the early phases of auto-enrolment, I do not think that we have a problem with charges. I stress that—in the early phases I do not think that we have a problem. On the whole, we are dealing with the huge employers—the big supermarkets and some of the public sector. They have people spending time and effort shopping around. They can drive a hard bargain. They are engaged with pensions—I do not think that we have a problem there.

The challenge for Government is further down the track, as we get towards the medium and smaller firms that are clearly less profitable for the providers. We hope that many will go to NEST. When the pensions regulator writes to them a year out, we will flag up NEST. We will say that we have created NEST and that it is designed specifically with them in mind, and that they should have a look at it. There is a risk, however, that people will go to other providers and end up with high-cost providers. That is why we are looking at the issue of charge caps. In the debate, we heard two competing views on that: the call for charge caps, and the view that we should go for light-touch regulation and charge caps as a last resort. That is the dilemma we face.

It is only fair to say that charges are paying for something. In a transparent world, there may be a case for what looks like a high pension charge if people get something for it. I use the analogy that if all someone wants is vanilla then that is fine. We might say that vanilla ought to be cheap. If someone wants raspberry ripple, we might let them pay a little bit extra for it. We do not necessarily want to say that it is evil to charge more than a certain amount for a pension, but people should certainly know what it is they are paying and know what they get for it. For example, if someone is offering a sophisticated or niche investment, they should be able to charge for it, as long as we know what it is. The focus of our attention on charges is particularly on the area of default funds, because those will be the ones where people have made no active choice, where they have just been lumped in, and we need to ensure that people are protected.

[David Mowat]

I hear the Minister’s analogy of vanilla versus raspberry ripple. Raspberry ripple is analogous to actively managed funds. Remembering that those funds are heavily subsidised and paid for by a lot of Government money, is it his assessment that actively managed funds give value for money in the industry, and have demonstrated that they have been clearly better than tracker funds in the past decade or so?

[Steve Webb]

I suspect that the arguments over the merits of active management against passive trackers and so on are food for longer than a seven-minute debate, and are the source of much contention. The point that I am making is not so much that one or other is good or bad, but that we want individuals who make active choices. They can have a knickerbocker glory if they like. They ought to be able to choose as long as they know what they are getting, and can make an assessment on whether they are getting value for money. The worry we have is that, if people end up defaulted into something, they do not know what has been done to them, do not make any choices and potentially find that a big chunk of their money is going in charges. In such circumstances, the case for action is stronger.

That is not straightforward, however. What is a charge? My hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth listed a whole raft of different things that can be mentioned in the course of setting out charges. Do we just cap an annual management charge? If so, what about transactions charges and sales charges? The danger is that, if we cap a bit of the charge, we squeeze the balloon and it just comes out somewhere else. It is easy to say, and I have said it, “Oh, we just cap charges.” Actually doing it and defining charges is less straightforward than one might imagine.

In the few minutes available to me—I believe that a Division in the House is imminent—I would like to pick up on the scale of the deferred member charges. For group personal pensions and stakeholder pensions, where one of those deferred member premiums is charged, our survey evidence from 2010 is that for active members we are typically talking about 0.6% as an AMC, but for deferred members an average of approximately 1%. These numbers vary a lot, but even that, as we have heard, cumulatively is a big chunk out of people’s pensions and something that we want to do something about.

To clarify the NEST charging structure, it has a contribution charge of 1.8% and an AMC of 0.3%. It is structured like that because NEST was started from scratch and so has to borrow money to start at business. It has to set up and be all in place before the first pound comes through the door some years later. The Government lent NEST that money on favourable terms because of its public service obligation. The 1.8% contribution charge reflects the Government loan. When that Government loan is paid off, the 1.8% charge will go. Having said that, it will be quite a number of years before it does: it is not permanent, but it is not short-term. It will be with us for some years, but that is why the structure is as it is. The 1.8% contribution charge and 0.3% AMC average out at approximately 0.5%. We are finding that the market is now coming down to about that level.

On charge caps, people sometimes say that, if there is a charge cap, the danger is that everybody goes up—the maximum becomes the minimum. I do not think that that will happen in this case, because we have NEST in the market. We are making sure that NEST is at a certain level, so charging could not be sustained at a much higher level. Therefore, I do not think that the argument against charge caps actually holds.

We heard a number of other points during the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South referred to a £40 billion subsidy. That depends on how we look at it. Tax relief, fundamentally, is avoiding double taxation. If I earn some money, pay tax on it and then invest in a pension out of my post-tax income and am then taxed on my pension, that will be double taxation. We give tax relief on the pension contribution. Leaving aside the issue of higher rate relief, which is a different issue, someone who is on a standard rate of tax when they earn the money and a standard rate of tax when they draw the pension is being taxed once. I do not count that as a subsidy of the pension industry; I just count that as not double taxing people. There is a bit of an issue about higher rate relief, particularly when people retire on a standard rate, but I do not think we subsidise the pensions industry—that is not the way I would view it.

My hon. Friend raised an important point about comparability. We know that swapping energy tariffs, as he says, is a real challenge. As soon as someone has changed energy supplier, they can often jack the charges up. It is less straightforward at least with pension providers, because if someone signs on to a contract there are terms and conditions on whether they can subsequently be changed. It would be a good thing to get that transparency in place.

Drawing some of these threads together in this very important debate, I welcome the Select Committee’s inquiry, and the work it did recently in questioning witnesses. I welcome the lead that the NAPF is taking on this issue and the fact that it is bringing industry players together. A new industry code of practice would be an important step in the right direction. The Government may well have a role. We will certainly work closely with the NAPF and the industry to support that work. At the same time, we are looking at the role of charge caps and whether they have a part to play in auto-enrolment. We do not anticipate the issue of charges being a big problem in the short term. The scale of the market early on is a small number of big buyers who are relatively well informed and relatively well resourced, so we think that that will work well, but we are actively considering whether we need to go further. We all want to protect individuals and ensure that, of the money that goes into their pension, far more goes out in the form of pensions. That, I think, is a goal we all share.