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Don't let regulation rain on your parade
Making it easier to tackle climate change risks
Revisit the day's talks
Bob Scott
LCP’s first virtual pensions conference came after a year of unprecedented turmoil, change and upheaval with 2021 promising a tsunami of legislative, regulatory and economic changes.
Keynote speaker Matthew Syed drew on material from his recent book “Rebel Ideas – the power of diverse thinking”. He contrasted those with a fixed mindset ("know-it-alls") and those with a growth mindset ("learn-it-alls") and showed how Microsoft's recent success had followed a switch to a growth mindset. He also explained why a group of like-minded people will make less accurate predictions than a diverse group of people with different perspectives.
As Covid-19 continues to cast a shadow over all our lives, we heard from epidemiologist Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard about the possible implications of the pandemic in the longer-term. There were some surprising insights. For example, if we take account of indirect deaths as well as direct deaths from Covid-19, men and women seem to be affected equally, although there is significant disparity between different groups across the population. We also heard that future modelling should focus more on the different causes of death where trends differed widely between, for example, dementia and cancer mortality rates.
Co-operation and collaboration are shown to bear more fruit than confrontation as Steven Taylor and Fran Bailey showcased a negotiation between trustees and employers over funding and security as the employer seeks to recover from the effects of Covid-19 on its business.
We heard from experts about developments in investments for defined contribution schemes (Stephen Budge) about the emerging market in superfund consolidators (Sam Jenkins) and about the recent announcement on RPI reform (Jonathan Camfield). Each speaker provided delegates with a clear action plan for 2021 and beyond.
After a light-hearted look at the difficulties facing schemes required to provide data to the pensions dashboard programme, Claire Jones outlined the benefits of climate scenario analysis for turning uncertain thoughts into definitive action. Claire also described the service provided by LCP in partnership with Ortec Finance for illustrating climate risks on assets and liabilities.
Anais Caldwell-Jones explained how passive equity funds can be tilted towards climate-friendly investments – significantly reducing exposure to climate risks but without varying the sector allocations of the portfolio.
We heard that listening was a key element of communicating with members and David Millar suggested that most communication mistakes come from assuming that we know something which turns out not to be true.
Finally, former pensions minister Steve Webb explained why Government is so keen to hear from all of us. Steve’s advice was to engage early, engage often and engage broadly over forthcoming legislation and regulation. Don’t assume that someone else will make your point for you.
Overall, we provided a diverse range of topics and speakers to prepare delegates for a busy 2021 and beyond. In the following pages, we’ve set out further articles of topical interest as well as a video montage of the conference. Do feel free to get in touch with any of the LCP speakers or authors - or with me - if you would like further insight on any of the topics covered.
From first to last each speaker showed how, by learning the lessons from this "annus horribilis" that is 2020, we can look forward to 2021 confident that we know what needs to be done.
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