HM Treasury head of pensions investment review, Joanne Gibson, has announced that the government is planning to share a roadmap to show how upcoming pension reforms and policy changes will fit together.

Speaking at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) Investment Conference 2025, Gibson acknowledged that “there is a lot of change happening quickly”, with some in the industry calling for further clarity on the sequencing for a number of upcoming reforms.

Indeed, whilst industry experts have broadly welcomed the objectives behind the government's plans to introduce defined contribution (DC) megafunds, concerns around the proposed approach have been raised, with some warning that implementing overlapping proposals could be "wasteful" and compromise the overall efficiency gains intended by the government.

In particular, industry experts have suggested that existing initiatives such as value for money (VfM), small pots and DC decumulation are also expected to have the effect of driving consolidation.

Given this, Gibson acknowledged that “sequencing is going to be really important, given all the other reforms that are happening”.

When asked by session chair and PLSA deputy director of policy, Joe Dabrowski, Gibson also specifically confirmed that the government is still looking to introduce the VfM Framework alongside broader Mansion House reforms.

She confirmed that the need for sequencing was also a key theme raised in the responses to the consultation, providing some early insight into the feedback shared by industry.

“There was a lot [of consultation responses] and they were very long,” she said, revealing that there were around 112 responses to the DC consultation, and over 200 on the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) consultation.

“The themes coming out would not surprise you,” she said, continuing: “It’s lot of understanding what the impact this is going to have, whether it is going to actually have the outcomes that we we are looking for, and are there other ways we we can look at this?

"There was a lot of support for scale but not necessarily so much support in terms of hard deadlines or the speed.

"There was also feedback on impacts in terms of the cost, disruption to the market of such a big change."

However, Gibson emphasised that there was also "a lot of a lot of goodwill on on trying to find a way a way to make the change that the government is wanting".

Adding to this, Now Pensions director of public affairs and policy, Lizzy Holliday, also stressed the need to understand sequencing from a practical delivery perspective, , noting that schemes will need to be dealing with long lead in times for much of this work.

She stated: “If you're thinking about where you want to be as a scheme in 2-5 years’ time, but actually you're not sure if you'll exist as a scheme at that time, there are big changes and big investments as a business in terms of what you will need to change to change to be able to meet some of these requirements and they have a long lead in time.

"So we really welcome having a roadmap to show us what that looks like."

Holliday suggested that a lack of a roadmap could also prove important for the government’s reforms to meet their “essential objective of investing in private markets”.

She explained: "There's going to be a lot of turmoil because of consolidation and scale, and that’s probably going to put off some people from going for the private market investment because they may have to disinvest and all the costs and the resource that's going to be used for that.

"So getting the sequencing right actually has a material impact on the objective achievement as well as from a very practical point of view that these things take a lot of planning and resource from within the industry."

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