Notes on week 39 of 2025:

• also known as week notes,

• cover 22 to 28 September 2025,

• started 26 September 2025,

• published 27 September 2025, 

• updated 28 September 2025.

New project 🥳

Last week I finished up 3 fab months with Transform. I’m eternally grateful to Peter Rottier for the opportunity. Sure I’ll be back at some point. Transform’s my kinda company 💚 

This week I joined The Pension Regulator (TPR). The potential engagement and community work is amazing. The potential outcomes are even better.

This will be my 16ᵗʰ public sector project. But 1ˢᵗ time contracting. So the pressure’s on, even more than usual.

Design led engagement specialist

In my humble opinion, the role is:

• stakeholder engagement, 

• community development, 

• event management.

What I love is the user-centred design (UCD) focus. Hence the job title, “Design led engagement specialist”. This is down to the awesome Dr Marion Lean. She leads TPR’s Innovation and Design team, and she’s the reason I joined TPR (via an intro from Lisa Allen). 

Pension industry innovation 

My 1ˢᵗ task is a new Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) working group. TPR DDaT director Paul Neville’s recent blog post describes the group as:

• a cross-sector initiative to shape the future of pensions through DDaT transformation,

• a diverse mix of people including tech innovators, pension trustees, data specialists and voices from academia, civil society and other sectors,

• focused on key challenges like data quality, regulatory efficiency and digital integration.

Basically; bring us together and make things better (my professional motto). 

Work in public

Lisa and Marion shared a brilliant handover doc with me at the start of the week. It contains everything I should be doing (so far). Channelling my inner Jukesie, I’m converting it into a public kanban board.

As always, it’ll be interesting to balance openness and whatever pushback I may get (not that I expect any, yet). I’m new to TPR and I suspect they’re new to my style of working. It’ll be a fascinating journey for both of us.

Open Data Camp

To prepare myself, I attended Open Data Camp in Edinburgh this weekend. Was great to see Pauline Roche, Mike Rose and others. Unfortunately the font of all knowledge Owen Boswarva wasn't there. I hoped to learn more about Open Banking and how it might work in the pension industry. 

So I pitched a session titled Open pensions: Open banking part deux (that link takes you to the session notes) which 8 of us attended. I was very glad Mary Drabble was there to share her pension industry knowledge.

Near the end of the session I asked for ideas to take back to TPR and got:

• unique (via Dr Amy Roberts) - If needed, use properly unique identifiers that contain no personal identifiable information, e.g. random string of characters such as 0009-0003-2340-207X which is the format used for Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCID), 

• opportunity (via Mary Drabble) - Give pension scheme providers opportunities to help customers improve their financial strength and resilience (in return for their mandated help with the Pension Dashboard Programme),

• clarity (via Naomi Penfold) - Build for users, i.e. make sure whatever TPR or the pension industry design and build is simpler, clearer and faster (Naomi mentioned the Pension Bee app has a good user experience, irrespective of their business model). 

Open pensions

A big focus of the TPR DDaT working group is pension industry data. Make data better, make data open. Surface it via APIs (my colleague Lucy and her team are doing this). This will help the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) which’ll let you see all of your pensions in 1 place. 

I was at the Service Design in Government conference earlier this month with Marion and others. There was a brilliant PDP related talk from service designer Alix Speed and user experience (UX) consultant Lia Emanuel. It was about how service designers can apply "zoom level" systems thinking to address public sector design challenges. The context was money guidance services, hence the PDP link. 

Just before the talk started, Marion turned to me and playfully said, “This is your job!”. Turns out a large minority of pension scheme records aren’t digitised or available via APIs. The PDP needs this in order to give users what they need. So I’ll need to help the TPR DDaT working group tease these records out of the pension industry. 

Open Banking is a model that Open Pensions could use. But Open Banking took 8 years to implement. My contract with TPR is for 6 months. So I need to crack on and get the DDaT working group set-up and working fast.

Volunteering

Outside of work I currently volunteer as:

• webmaster for a local community group,

• ADHD Pathfinding delivery manager (DM), 

• UKGovCamp treasurer / DM mentor, 

• OneTeamGov North organiser, 

• DeliverCon organiser, 

• …and more.

Some volunteering only involves occasional meetings, such as DeliverCon and ADHD Pathfinding. Others take ½ a day, such as my local community work.

But channelling my inner Russell Davies, I want to pick just 3 things which are:

1. definitely my local community work - a great way to meet people and learn more about where Janet & I now live,

2. ADHD Pathfinding work, as I’m still learning about my ADHD and Autism diagnoses (plus I want to “give back” to the NHS for everything they’ve done), 

3. but I'm not sure about what comes 3ʳᵈ 🤔.

UKGovCamp is close to my heart (it’s where I met Janet) and it's a brilliant event / community. But OneTeamGov North is based in Manchester, closer to home. Mind you, UKGovCamp 2026 will be in Birmingham, so swings and roundabouts. 

Will have to think on this more. Feel free to get in touch if you have thoughts or other suggestions. 

What I learnt this week

• The pension industry is fascinating,

• Its okay to be a contractor,

• I love where I live.