Wealth Adviser: Malcolm Cuthbert

One of the principal charges made against the pensions industry is that it is boring. From cabinet ministers to captains of industry to the media, everyone insists the way to bridge the discrepancy between levels of public interest and the interests of society is to somehow make the business of dusty ledger books and obscure actuarial calculations less dull.

It is enough to make even the most diligent interviewer’s heart sink then to discover that Malcolm Cuthbert’s professional mission in life is to convince his fellow Britons of the value of self invested pension plans (Sipps).

The Killik director can claim no small success in at least making Sipps successful: he has increased the level of assets in the company’s wrap service more than tenfold to around £500 million in the past five years.

‘I like Sipps and I believe in them but I think they have to go a lot further to get people interested. We need to engage people. Whoever is elected, I would like to see them make it easier to take control because that is how you interest them.

‘There is a convincing case for allowing people to use them to pay off student debts or allowing them to put down a deposit on a house.

‘It is a very good and tax-efficient way to save but someone in their mid-20s isn’t going to use it. The pound in their pocket is always going to be worth a lot more than the pound in their pension, unless you allow them to make it their own, make it relevant to their lives.’

Born in the early 1960s in Kent, he attended Haileybury boarding school, going on to St Andrews to study history. After graduation he moved back to the south and signed up with the Hertfordshire Constabulary.

‘I had – and like to think I still have – a social conscience and I wanted to feel I was putting something back into the community. It was a very tumultuous time though… I think people tend to forget just how much conflict and unrest there was until we started to get the prosperity of the late 1980s.’

His experience of the time was at the sharp end of the conflict: drafted in to join the police lines trying, often unsuccessfully, to prevent striking miners and strike breakers from coming to blows.