We Need Frank

Andrew Smith has just resigned as the pensions minister. I’m not particularly interested in the political backstory to this; I’m much more interested in the opportunity it offers to undo one of the Original Sins of New Labour.

It was an appalling mistake to sack Frank Field and it is time to undo it.

Straight up at the start, I must confess that I don’t like Frank Field. He is a God-botherer and he is entirely too keen on what I regard as alarmingly authoritarian schemes to try and reform the feckless poor through government action[1]. I would say that he has a nasty case of the pathologised form of the Work Ethic, and that the poor and unfortunate can generally do without the kind of help that well-meaning social reformers tend to inflict on them.

However, I am not recommending that he be drafted to a position in the Home Office. The job that has come open is in pensions, and Frank Field understands pensions (I’ve selected an article more or less at random there; his site is chock full of sensible articles about them). Nobody else in government does (or at least, nobody acts as if they do), and this matters. The UK has a problem with insufficient saving for the long term, and nobody appears to see that the obvious reason why UK punters don’t save enough for the long term is that the only way for them to do so would be to hand over their cash to an industry which has suffered PR disaster after disaster. At the same time, the great and the good of our country have found it very difficult to communicate to the public that the amount of saving that their employer has been carrying out on their behalf has been drastically reduced, mainly because to do so would most likely involve owning up to the fact that the movement from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans has been carried out on terms which seem more or less equivalent to a 5% wage cut over the last ten years.

Pensions are important, and boring. We’ve covered the issue a few times in the past. In a nutshell, people don’t understand pensions because they’re difficult and dull, people have been rather systematically taken advantage because of this asymmetry of knowledge, and because people dimly realise this, they don’t trust the pensions system. Which means that they don’t save, which is bad news.

Now I am told from Newsnight that a likely candidate for the pensions minister job is Geoff Hoon. There is something about Hoon’s record that rather suggests to me that he is probably the wrong choice if you want to project an image of trustworthiness.

The fact that appointing Frank Field would be a massive up-yours to Gordon Brown should not really carry that much weight in Tony Blair’s decision process, but if it’s the featherweight that tips the scales, I promise not to grumble.

Footnote:
[1]I have a post in the works on the general issue of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) in the UK. In summary, I’ve seen them work in my part of London. I agree with the general concept that even though the danger of abuse is obvious, there is a role for a police power to exclude known bad elements from their place of business without the requirement to catch them in an illegal act. ASBOs have worked very well against localised crack problems, for example. However, this success in small local pilot schemes should not be taken as warranting throwing the bloody things around like confetti; there are quite obvious reasons why this pilot is unlikely to scale. But this is for another post.