A lesson from the past about policymaking for an uncertain future

The week before I started my role at Pensions UK, I went to check on the retirement flat of my late parents, which my sisters and I have yet to sell.

Going through some of my father’s old papers, I came across a booklet called ‘Forward to retirement’. This helpful guide, published a year before I was born, accompanied a 10-part BBC series on retirement readiness, directed by my father.

I stared at it open-mouthed. I’ve been working in the pensions sector for over two decades, but somehow my father never mentioned that one of his many TV documentaries was on my own specialist subject. Not for the first time since his death in November 2023, I was left wishing I could ask him more.

There’s so much I don’t know about his fascinating and peripatetic life, which began in Malaysia in 1940, then bounced around the world, between wartime evacuation to Australia, via flying unaccompanied halfway around the world to Yorkshire at the age of 11 to attend secondary school, then in adulthood racking up thousands of air miles as the director of the series Whicker’s World. But there was no chance now to ask him about any of this now. The flat felt suddenly very empty.

As I flicked through ‘Forward to retirement’, I wondered what help it might have been to my parents, as they prepared for a retirement that in the end did not go at all to plan. Although my business-owner father and fine-artist mother were statistically highly privileged in terms of their assets, their social networks and their housing situation, their best-laid plans were largely dashed by ill-health and unexpected care needs.

My mother’s Alzheimer’s and my father’s Parkinson’s were first diagnosed at around the same time and seemed to progress in the same lockstep with which my parents had gone about most things together – collaboratively, to shared goals and with a high degree of bickering. Our efforts as a family to ensure they both had the care and living environments they needed were rendered a thousand times more complicated by the onset of Covid lockdowns.

All of which is a subject for another article. My point is, even the best-laid plans of retirees who can easily achieve Pensions UK’s ‘comfortable’ retirement living standard are often thrown awry by unexpected turns of events.

So: how might a BBC guide from the 1960s have helped them prepare for this? Cross-legged on the floor of the empty bedroom, I opened the dusty booklet and read through topics including ‘money matters’ and ‘a new way of life’.

Lessons from the past

What did I learn? First, it’s fair to say that attitudes to retirement adequacy have changed a great deal in the past 50 years:

“The first reaction of most people to a reference to their retirement is to wonder how on earth they are going to manage on ‘the pension’. At first sight the drop from salary or wages does seem pretty steep, but a careful – and honest – scrutiny of all the factors involved will sometimes show a different picture. […]

“Daily travel is reduced; standards of dress are different […]; there are no business colleagues to be rivalled or surpassed in entertaining.

“The production of home-grown fruit, vegetables, eggs, poultry or honey will not only reduce the food bills, but permit a better diet and provide an interest and an occupation, as well as exercise. Time is money and in retirement you have time to do your own home decorating and running repairs.”

As, indeed, have the strikingly regressive attitudes to gender:

“Women have the advantage here. They can buy lengths of material during the years before retirement, which can be turned into dresses or furnishings during the extra leisure they have in retirement. For those who need help there are classes in dressmaking and upholstery at many centres of further education.”

And indeed housing:

“The single octogenarian or nonagenarian is glad to be in a bedsitter again with someone else to do the chores.”

Hmm. Doesn’t sound like my parents.

But what about questions of health and disease? Again, the advice on offer didn’t really seem to address their situation. Much of it is along the lines of this helpful tip:

“Caring properly for the feet by having correct footwear and by getting corns […] regularly attended to by a chiropodist can prevent serious circulatory challenges.”

Well, yes, but what of the major degenerative diseases that struck my parents? It’s particularly striking that the booklet doesn’t even mention dementia, now the biggest killer among women of retirement age. Heart disease is singled out, but that’s about it.

It’s easy to pick holes in a booklet put together so long ago, but there’s a serious point here. It’s not just that our attitudes and expectations have changed. We’re living longer, and enjoying far higher average standards of living, than was the case fifty years ago.

This means longer planning horizons, greater uncertainty, higher rates of degenerative conditions, and greater disappointment at how little income many people’s savings can provide when stretched out over such a long phase of life.

The future of retirement adequacy

All of which brings me to the reason I left the brilliant research and innovation team at Nest Insight to head up strategic policy and research at Pensions UK.

We’re facing a very real challenge of inadequate levels of savings, and pension schemes are being expected to deliver far more.

We’re facing a very real challenge of inadequate levels of savings, and meanwhile pension schemes are being expected to deliver far more, in spite of a challenging investment environment. All of this is well-known to pension professionals, and now it’s also firmly in the lens of the government. We’re rightly facing an unprecedented level of change and policy scrutiny.

It’s vital that we as a sector set a clear path forward, not just through the immediate challenges of the present moment, but in the face of the continued barrage of change that the next few years will bring. In my new role, I hope to help predict these future challenges and develop the evidence that will help us shape and influence retirement policies that are fit for the future.

If we get this right, we’ll be able to face the coming years with a lot more clarity and certainty than my parents were able to do. I look forward to working with the Pensions UK membership, and its brilliant team of experts, to help make this a reality.

Matthew Blakstad is deputy director for strategic policy and research at Pensions UK.