Financialisation and social protection? The UK’s path towards a socially protective public–private pension system

Consideration of pension financialisation in recent years has focused on the rise of defined contribution pensions, highlighting the greater level of individualised interaction this has encouraged between citizens and the financial sector. This development has generally been seen as unequivocally neo-liberal, complementary to retrenching reforms replacing private provision for public. This chapter, in contrast, argues for a less rigid, more fluid understanding of UK pension financialisation, one that has entailed the interaction of financialising and progressive social protection agendas in a politics more diverse and negotiated than proposed in the current literature. The result in 2019 is a UK public-private pension mix under which at least some traditional social protection objectives are met through social regulation rather than public provision. To emphasise the continuing role for agents in today’s system, the paper finishes by proposing two ambitious, but feasible, regulatory reforms designed to enhance the system’s socially protective features.