Whether you’re a saver or a pensioner, customer or professional, it’s difficult to tell how the vast UK pension system fits together, where things are going well and why, and what is changing over time.

Last year, the PPI embarked upon a project to tackle these questions. In 2021, we designed the UK Pensions Framework, the first research instrument of its kind to look across the whole UK pension system to understand how policy changes in one area can affect aspects of another and how cumulative impacts add up.

This year, we’re analysing over 40 different indicators that can help us develop a picture of how the system is working through the lenses of adequacy, sustainability and fairness.

So far, we’re seeing that improvements in the number of people contributing to private pensions are offset by the relatively low level of savings they are putting aside, and that where improvements are being made, they’re often not made equally among different groups.

We’re seeing how changing patterns in employment and lifetime saving are leading to significant variation in the extent to which people might achieve adequate financial outcomes in retirement, and the extent to which these outcomes might be sustainable, or the differences fair.

In late November, we’ll bring all these findings together in one report. We’ll use it to compare changes year-on-year. Watch this space!

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