There is “evermore of the wrong kind [of EU] in pensions”, Sigedis general director, Steven Janssen, has argued.

Delivering a keynote speech at the PensionsEurope Annual Conference last week in Brussels, Janssen criticised the EU’s involvement in the pensions sector and the growing number of EU regulations the industry is faced with.

He said: “From my point and given the organisation that I work for, that’s the point of view of communication, data sharing, data use, there is evermore EU in pensions, or perhaps I should say, there is evermore of the wrong kind in pensions, or evermore of the EU and ever less pensions in the equation. Saying that is a problem is one thing, trying to find the reasons why is something else.”

He includes within this the European Commission, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and the European Central Bank (ECB), adding that at a national level the same problems arise.

Janssen believes there are three “very fundamental” reasons why there is “too much of the wrong kind of EU” in pensions: Mistaking means for goals, ignoring the importance of national pension regulation and everyone is a pensions Platonist – the philosophy of Plato.

“These three problems are very much interlinked,” he said.

“The first, we mistake means for goals, we mistake the means to provide for a pension, for a pension itself. We mistake the product behind the pension and the pension provider for the pension itself. It seems obvious and self-evident that these too are not the same and yet the Financial Data Access (FiDA) framework claims that by sharing data on financial products… you just somehow magically produce more exciting pensions.

“The EC seems to think that more rules for pension providers somehow magically contributes to more people getting better pensions,” he said.

Secondly, he believes that policy ignores “how a pension system is construed and how it functions” in real lives in each country.

“Non pension needs are part of a pension architecture – for instance, whether a pension has free universal health coverage, in addition to the pension, or whether [people] still must pay health cover premiums from their pension, it makes a big difference.

“Whether mortgage free homeownership is a rule in a given country, or pensioners are faced with paying a monthly substantial amount for their housing. That makes a big difference on what a pension actually means in a specific country and how a pensioner sees themselves in a specific country, and kind of information a future pensioner needs.”

For example, in Belgium, the second pillar is a small part of people’s pension that is generally paid as a one-off lump sum and people rely much more on the first pillar.

“Ignoring the first pillar in a country like Belgium is basically ignoring 93.78 per cent, for men, and 97.80 per cent of future income for women… to make things worse the IORP II Directive and FiDA, to some extent, seem to be very fond of pension funds. In Belgium the pension funds only cover one-fifth of invested benefits, that means that IORP II and FiDA only look at one-fifth of 6.22 per cent pension income for men and one-fifth of 2.82 per cent of pension income for women.

“These numbers and this reality make these well-meant but very myopic initiatives of the European Commission, given the narrow view they have, means that they hardly contribute to any better understanding of the pension situation in Belgium.”

Finally, we are all pensions Platonists, which he said is the philosophical basis for the previous errors he highlighted.

“In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, there is an ideal reality that is permanent, imperishable, and unchangeable and existing outside time and space. Everything we experience is just an imperfect reflection, a variation on those ideas. The only source of real knowledge is the ideal world where the ideas live,” Janssen explained.

“The EU acts as if it has direct access to the platonic world of ideas, and therefore to universal knowledge of what is an ideal pension, an ideal pension policy, always and everywhere. Its solutions are therefore also ideal. For those that are confused by now, the word ideal is not positive in those sentences.”

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