My Last BeeLine

Oh well! It had to happen what with me changing jobs and everything; so here I am writing my last ever BeeLine. I suppose I’ve known for months that I’d be doing this one day, so I’ve had plenty of time to think about what to write. But as usual with me I haven’t really done that (like I haven’t done my tax return yet either). I’m rubbish at forward planning if I’m being honest; so here I am in the fogged-in airport just writing it anyway.

Today I’m also on my way to the last ever gig in the Never-Ending Pensions Tour (which is about to do so after all) and, yet again, my early morning plane is delayed. It’s the way things are.

Thinking about it plenty of the BeeLines I’ve written over the years have been composed on railway stations and in airport lounges while I’ve been travelling the country. It’s become sort of a way of life to me I guess. I’ve actually even started to think about it as being normal.

It’s normal for me too to be writing. I’ve been knocking out the BeeLines for the BeeHive site now for just on ten years; that’s a long time. Plenty of people have asked me over the years how I find so much to write about, “I mean, like it’s just a website about pensions, right?” Well that’s right, but if I’m being honest my main regret has been that I’ve never really thought that I’ve ever done enough to cover everything that’s gone on – it’s a big subject and, sadly, the main feature of the UK pensions scene has been constant change.

The rate of change seems to me to be picking up speed again (unlike the plane I’m sitting in on the runway right now (we were boarded while I was halfway through that last paragraph)). Indeed, I think that as 2010 starts we’re at the beginning of the most important five-year period in the history of pensions in this country since the end of the 1950s.

At the moment we’ve got fewer than 100,000 active workplace pension schemes in the UK, but the auto-enrolment legislation will affect something like 1.1 million employers. That means we’re going to have about a million new workplace pension schemes created in the next five years. Yes, you heard that right; a million! If that hasn’t got ‘Wow!’ written all over it I don’t know what has.

But that’s the future and today’s BeeLine at least is supposed to be about the past. That was my intention anyway. What were the highlights? That sort of thing. Well, there’ve been plenty of them, but to pick a few…

The so-called Battle of the Blogs http://tinyurl.com/ycye2a6 that I had with James Purnell when he was the Minister for Pensions Reform was kind of a defining moment for the BeeHive I suppose. Got a lot of interest.

The monitoring and reporting on the A-Day changes too – a time when I really didn’t think there were enough hours in the day to keep up with it all (even with ace-researcher Ms Bruun on the case). One of my favourite ever BeeLines was published on the eve of A-Day in fact. That was when we decided to put out a Cartoon History of A-Day http://tinyurl.com/yb2gx97 that reprinted a hundred or so of the Planet Stakeholder cartoon strips that I’d somehow managed to draw in my sparse spare time between 2004 and 2006. We got a load of good feedback about that one and to be honest it probably contained more accessible pension information than most other commentators’ scribblings on the subject.

It was also a great honour to find that the BeeHive was named as one of the Times’ Top 50 Business Blogs in 2008 and then went on to make their Top 20 in 2009. To be honest it was only then that I found out what a blog was – I’d never heard the term before. I just thought I’d been wobbling on about pensions; that’s all.

On the wobbling front, one of my biggest mistakes I think came back at the beginning of the last football World Cup when, for reasons that are no longer clear to me, I decided to write a BeeLine detailing the pension systems in all the competing countries. To start with it was an amazingly complex and time-consuming  research task. It also ended up as the longest BeeLine I had ever written and as a result probably the least read. Worse than that, though, by the time I’d finished it there were only eight teams left in the competition so it was all a bit pointless really. But you can’t get it right every time. Well, I can’t.

Anyway, I’m going on a bit and our plane’s finally looking like taking off and that means I’ll soon get to eat my breakfast so I should just sign off I guess. Before I do that though I’d just like to say thanks to all of you who’ve stuck with the BeeLines through the years. One of the pleasures of my life has been to read the many e-mails you’ve written in to the BeeHive; they’ve kept me going through the tough stuff. Thanks for being BeeLiners.

That’s it then. The end of the BeeHive. But it’s not the end of my blogging days. I’ll still be writing about pensions (it’s what I do) and I hope I won’t be that hard to find. Who knows, maybe you’ll seek me out again…

19 January 2010