Life & Pensions Latest - November 2025

This week, SEC Newgate attended a speech with Richard Tice at Bloomberg’s offices, in which he set out the Reform Party’s plan for financial services regulation and pensions among an assembled audience of City representatives. Our key takeaways as follows:

The policy diagnosis – over-regulation

Tice diagnosed the UK’s problems as a combination of a growth crisis and a debt crisis, complete with scary graphs of growth flatlining and debt increasing into the future. He highlighted that in 2050, debt to GDP would reach 200%, which, in his view, is completely unsustainable.

The solution to this is to tackle the problem of over-burdensome regulation which had impacted the entire sector. To get growth, he argued, you need accept the concept of risk and you need financial services firms to take sensible and calculated risk. Referencing the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of financial markets in the 1980s, he argued that financial services had driven steady economic growth in the 80s and 90s, but this had dried up in the past decade thanks to over-regulation and gave a litany of examples that many people in the City would be familiar with – MiFID II, Know Your Customer (KYC), the lack of listings on the London Stock Exchange (both main market and AIM). He described previous Conservative and current Labour attempts to tackle these problems as ‘tinkering at the edges’ – and what was needed was ‘Big Reform’ to match the impact of the original Big Bang.

He also questioned the governance and mandate of the key regulators, including the Bank of England (noting the lack of democratic scrutiny of their quantitative tightening programme), as well as the PRA and FCA.

Asking business to help deliver ‘Big Reform’

Tice did not provide a detailed policy plan to tackle this problem, instead he announced that the Party was setting up four working groups to develop policies in time for the next election – these would be on (1) Financial services regulation (2) SME finance (3) Pensions and Savings and (4) Taxation reform. These working groups will be effectively managed by Reform-aligned think tank ‘Centre for a Better Britain’, and Tice invited the sector to engage and propose policy ideas within these groups. 

This process clearly represents a more professionalised approach to policy-making than the Party has previously engaged with (to date, policy has been dependent on a very small group of people (namely Nigel Farage, Tice himself and Zia Yusuf), although you could sense that this process is as much as creating buy-in from the financial services sector as it is on specific policy proposals. 

Taking aim at public sector pensions

Tice described the UK pensions sector as ‘vital but complicated’ and said the UK needs to lean lessons from other nations, such as the Australian ‘super’ scheme’. He repeated his criticisms of the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) and the costs involved in managing them, but his main target appeared to be the unfunded DB schemes in the public sector, stating that the liabilities were ‘ballooning’ and no longer sustainable and therefore should be replaced with DC pensions for new workers.

Speaking to representatives and delegates after the event, there was a sense that Reform could afford to be bolder on pensions than the Conservative Party, given they are far less reliant on elderly voters. And by being bolder, especially on issues such as the state pension triple lock, they could offer a more credible message on fiscal responsibility, blunting one of the few remining attack lines from the Conservatives.

The vibe

Given Reform’s current polling, there was clearly a lot of interest in what Tice had to say from the financial services representatives, journalists and consultants. One of the striking things was how mainstream he sounded. Tice was very relaxed and comfortable talking to a City audience about regulation. This did not come across as the position of a so called ‘populist’ party. His diagnosis on the state of the economy and would have gained broad agreement from the room (although his anti-renewable energy views would have possibly caused more of a divide). In many ways, he sounded like a typical centre-right politician – and this perhaps reflects the confidence that Reform now has to occupy what would have previously been considered Conservative Party territory. Events like this will certainly feed the sense of momentum.