As Lord Northcliffe, arguably the inventor of the modern journalist, once apparently said:

“it’s not news when a dog bites a man, but it is news when a man bites a dog.”

This is, sadly, very true. Good news often makes for insipid stories, and indeed poor reading.

Yet this truism does open the door to purely negative journalism. We rarely get a positive news story about someone retiring with a good pension outcome (although thousands each year do just that), and instead are fed a constant diet of negative stories about UK pensions.

And last weekend proved the point. Radio 4′s Money Box program, hosted by the dependable and knowledgeable Paul Lewis, gave the entire 30 minutes of their air time to ‘bad news’ pension stories.

Now some of those stories were about pure criminality. Not only did we have an industry professional jailed for 8 years for stealing millions of pounds of savers money, but we also had a number of investment scams for those in Self Invested Personal Pensions (SIPP’s). This is crime - pure and simple - and not indicative of the everyday working practices of the pensions industry as a whole.

Where there is money (and there is lots of money in pensions), there will be criminals, and no amount of regulation will stop them all. So it’s inevitable that some cases will happen, and we should all welcome the fact that these cases are being isolated, and placed before the courts.

But there were other items in the broadcast that concerned me more. Once again, we had a report authored by David Pitt-Watson, with a focus on charges in pension schemes. We have had this in previous years - and the headline figures being used for charges are just NOT indicative of the Group Pensions Market.

The vast majority of savers in company sponsored pension arrangements have a mono-charged product with charges at 1% or less per annum. Indeed, Steve Webb MP (The Minister for Pensions), stated that DWP analysis showed that 9 out of 10 schemes match this assertion. Otto Thoresen of the ABI also pointed out that the market has been essentially responsible for forcing such charges ever lower over the last few years. This in turn has benefited savers in pension schemes.

So, if you take nothing else from this post, please do understand that every coin has two sides, and there is much more good in the pensions market than bad.

Or to put it another way, perhaps “dog bites man” can still be a news story after all?

Best regards

Steve