Back from holiday and spring-cleaning my filing system today,
I find I have a huge accumulation of paperwork from the pension provider to my
previous employers. Printed booklets galore and endless computer outputs of information.
I think having computers has led to all sorts of guff
being regularly extruded. Most of it is pretty impenetrable, and although if I
pay attention I can understand it, for most people I guess it will be gobbledeguff.
This is not true information-giving, this is regulatory obfuscation. I suspect
it’s issued to avoid having to provide clear explanation, and so that in the
future they can say they told us, when in reality it’s about hiding from us. And
it must also be a landfill-sized waste of money.
I think the financial regulator should not be making these
companies produce all this stuff, but instead should have the stuff evaluated
to ensure that information is provided in the most minimal form possible and
psychologically assessed to check whether most people could take it in.
