One of the keys to a good pension plan is that it is easy for the contributors to understand, but the new NEST pension risks being buried in a sea of government-coined acronyms: PADA is a NDPB responsible for working with The DWP to introduce the NEST! Let’s cut through all this and look at what these pensions mean for the average worker in plain English.
The Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA) is a Non Departmental Public Body (NDPB) which is accountable to Parliament and reports to the Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on its progress in rolling out the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST).
NEST is the new name for what was previously referred to as Personal Accounts – a new pension scheme targeted at low and moderate income workers to be launched in 2011/2012. The impetus for the scheme is that the over 65s will have doubled in number by 2055, and based on current projections around seven million of them aren’t saving enough to have a pension that meets their demands. Following a 2005 report by the Pensions Commission, PADA was established specifically to introduce Personal Accounts. One of their first big announcements was to brand the accounts as NEST pensions, but what else have they been up to?
PADA is a transitory body to take us from a world with no decent trust-based occupational scheme for low income workers, to one where it becomes institutionalized. As well as communicating the nature of the scheme to employees and employers, PADA will supervise the handover to the Trust Corporation that will manage NEST pensions. Once the Trust Corporation is set up, PADA will become redundant.
Personal Accounts Delivery Authority Management Team
Tim Jones
Tim Jones is the Chief Executive Officer of PADA, and is an old hand in the financial services sector. His prior experience includes a position as Chief Executive of Retail Banking at Natwest, and Chief Executive with Mondex, Purseus Ltd and Simpay Limited. He has also held directorships with Investment Technology Group Inc.and Capital One Bank (Europe) PLC.
Pop Star Nick Carter (PADA's Carter Photo Unavailable)
Heading up the in-house legal team is ex- Freshfields man Nick Carter. With Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Nick gained experience outside of finance in the areas of intellectual property, IT litigation and transactions. Some of his clients at this time were in the public sector. Nick’s financial services experience includes a position as Chief Legal Counsel, International for Capital One Bank. This role included responsibility for internal audit, bank regulation, corporate affairs, enterprise risk management, and compliance. He also worked for PA Consulting just before joining PADA.
John Crilly
John Crilly is the experienced Financial Director at PADA One of the highlights of his career was joining Argonaut Games Ltd as a start-up and taking this fledgling technology company right through to a listing on the London Stock Exchange. John spent twenty years with Freeman’s PLC and Sears PLC working in Treasury and Corporate Finance.
Helen Dean
Helen Dean is on a secondment to PADA, and is a full-time civil servant with the Department for Work and Pensions. She heads up Policy and Product Development and draws on a strong track record in pensions policy, having previously been responsible for developing the initial policy on Personal Accounts. She also had a role in the introduction of the State Second Pension.
Mark Fawcett
Mark Fawcett has managed money for the last 21 years, thus not surprisingly he is PADA’s Investment Director. He has worked for Gartmore, Thames River Capital LLP, and American Express Asset Management International. He will play a critical role in managing not only the investment side, but also decumulation and volumes modeling.
Sam Hainsworth
Sam Hainsworth has been with PADA since it started up in 2007. As Chief of Staff she draws on experience gained at the Department for Work and Pensions where she she worked as part of the NEST pension policy division.
Simon Richards
The Business Delivery Director is Simon Richards. He has worked for many of the major financial services institutions in his time: Citibank, Price Waterhouse, and Goldman Sachs. He also took a step in an entrepreneurial direction when he founded Alpheus as an IT consultancy. He is a PADA board member.
Graham Vidler
Graham Vidler is the Director of Corporate Services at the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority. This means that he manages all the communications relating to the scheme and works closely with the DWP on stakeholder and media communications strategy. Graham has long been involved in pensions, and as a House of Commons researcher focused on pensions and social exclusion.
PADA’s management team is backed up by a heavyweight board:
- Jeannie Drake, Acting Chair
- Tim Jones, Chief Executive
- Helen Dean, Policy and Product Development
- Paul Hewitt, Non-Executive Director
- Simon Richards, Business Delivery Director
- Chris Willford, Non-Executive Director
- Alison Wright, Non-Executive Director
