One of the quickest ways to erode trust is the sense that people at the top play by different rules.
A clear example is the pension arrangement created for Keir Starmer when he was Director of Public Prosecutions. In 2013, the Treasury set up a tax-unregistered, one-member scheme for the DPP role. At the time, most savers were capped by the Lifetime Allowance (around £1m then), with heavy tax charges above it. The DPP scheme sat outside those limits by design.
While ordinary taxpayers were constrained by the cap, this bespoke scheme avoided it completely. As Thomas Fuller put it nearly four centuries ago: “One law for the rich and another for the poor.”
I’m not interested in party politics here and I’m not suggesting Starmer personally wrote the rules. What matters is the principle: the system often provides insiders with structures the rest of us don’t even know exist.
That realisation is one of the reasons we’ve set up the Contact Cultures SSAS (Small Self-Administered Scheme). It isn’t bespoke legislation, it’s a framework written into UK law that any business owner can use if they know about it. For us, it means Susan and I are members, our children will transfer their pensions in too, and together we’ll build one coordinated family pot rather than having everything scattered across different providers. With that fund we can buy commercial property, grow the pot through rental income and even lend money back to our own company within the rules.
The beauty of it is that when we borrow from the SSAS we pay it back with interest and that interest goes back into our own pension fund. Instead of lining the pockets of bridging lenders, we’re strengthening our family’s future. In other words, we’re recycling capital within our own balance sheet, building wealth and security that stays with us.
Special arrangements at the top prove one thing clearly: structures shape outcomes. We can’t rewrite the rules, but we can choose to use the structures that are available. For us, that means a SSAS. It aligns our investments with our values, gives us flexibility, reduces reliance on expensive short-term finance and ensures the interest we pay comes back to our family.
Now that our SSAS is live, the next step is opening the bank account, transferring in pensions, and targeting our first commercial property purchase inside the scheme. As the fund grows, we’ll use it to reduce borrowing costs and strengthen our portfolio, not just for today but for the generations that follow.
That is how we level the playing field. Not by complaining about who gets what, but by building a structure that works for us and for our legacy.
